Religious and legal traditions long defined goodness as fitness for a calendar of saints, a clan generation, or a grammar.
Modern marketing added rank, uniqueness and “CEO energy.” Those are new tests piled on old ones.
Timeline
- Saint-name economies
Christian baptismal practice tied “good” names to calendars and godparents in much of Europe.
- Chinese generation poems
Elite lineages used shared generation characters — a design for sibling sets, not a luck algorithm.
- Meiji family-name order
Japan required surnames of commoners; “good” now included a registerable family name plus given name.
- U.S. Americanisation drives
Schools and workplaces treated Anglicised names as “better” — a power story, not an aesthetic one.
- Creative spelling boom
English-language fashion widened the spelling space; “good” began to include distinctiveness.
- Icelandic committee statute
Modern Iceland restated that a good given name must fit grammar and the accepted list.
- A Matter of Taste
Lieberson gave researchers a non-moral language for why some names feel fresh then stale.
- Handle collision
A “good” name increasingly had to survive username uniqueness on global platforms.
Eras
- Liturgical — Calendar fit — A name was good if it placed a child in a religious year and a godparent network.
- Genealogical — Generation fit — Chinese and Korean systems judged names by sibling-set design and kin readability.
- Bureaucratic — Form fit — Passports and koseki made character lists and order part of quality.
- Market — Brand fit — Personal branding and baby-name blogs sold uniqueness as the main virtue.
Shifts
- From saint to statistic 19th–21st c. — Goodness talk moved from hagiography to SSA/ONS rank charts — still not destiny.
- From family veto to parent pair 20th c. — Many societies shifted the chooser from elders to parents, changing what “good” optimises.
- From one script to two lives 2000s– — Legal name and everyday name can diverge; quality now has two audiences.
The oldest test is still the hardest: can this community say the name, and will the bearer recognise themselves in it?