Browse by style
Rare Middle Names
80 genuinely seldom-given middle names, annotated — Edwardian, saintly, medieval, Cornish and Welsh — for parents who have read the popular lists and want something that is not on them.
Rare here means what it says: names that surface a handful of times a year in national records, if at all. That is a different order of scarcity from the unique middle names list, where the names are widely recognized and merely under-used. These are names most people have not encountered since a Victorian novel, a church calendar, or a great-great-grandmother's marriage certificate. Four seams supply nearly all of them: pre-Norman and medieval English (Cuthbert, Oswin, Rowena), Latin saints and martyrs (Perpetua, Silvanus, Eulalia), the Edwardian and Bloomsbury generation (Ottoline, Wystan, Lettice), and the Celtic-language names that never crossed into general English use (Morwenna, Blodwen, Caedmon). Not one of them is invented. Every name below has belonged to a real person, which is the line this list draws between rare and made-up.
Rare middles ask more of everybody than unique ones do, and the middle slot is exactly where that cost is affordable. Xanthe, Eulalia, and Caedmon will be misread — in the middle they will be misread perhaps twice a decade, and only by someone filling in a form. Pair them with a first name that carries no ambiguity whatsoever, so the child always has one name they never have to spell: Grace Perpetua, Thomas Alaric, Ella Morwenna. Beat count matters more on this page than any other, because old names run long. Petronella, Theodosia, and Zephaniah are four beats each and need a one- or two-beat first name in front of them, or the whole thing tips over. And say the seam aloud before you decide. These names end in sounds modern names rarely use — in -ric, -bert, -wen, -tua — and those endings collide audibly with a surname starting on the same consonant.
Top picks, annotated
- Ottoline — Edwardian, four beats, effectively unregistered for a century
- Aveline — the medieval original that eventually became Evelyn
- Perpetua — third-century martyr; unusual, but every syllable is legible
- Alaric — Gothic king; hard consonants, no spelling ambiguity at all
- Sunniva — Norse saint, often given as "sun gift"; three soft beats
- Cuthbert — Northumbrian saint, thoroughly out of use, entirely pronounceable
- Xanthe — ZAN-thee, Greek for golden; the last usable X name
- Thomasina — feminine Thomas, gone since the Victorians, honors any Tom
- Eulalia — yoo-LAY-lee-a, "sweet-spoken"; a mouthful worth it here
- Ellery — soft, surname-shaped, and still almost nobody's name
Both lists are alphabetical. Where a name is likely to be misread we have given the pronunciation with the annotated picks above; for the rest, the spelling is the pronunciation, which is the main reason these particular rare names survived in usable shape while thousands of their contemporaries did not.
For girls
- Araminta
- Blodwen
- Bryony
- Clemency
- Cressida
- Dorothea
- Drusilla
- Edwina
- Elspeth
- Ffion
- Gwendolen
- Honora
- Hyacinth
- Imelda
- Jessamine
- Keturah
- Leocadia
- Lettice
- Melisande
- Morwenna
- Nerissa
- Ondine
- Oriel
- Petronella
- Pomona
- Rosamund
- Rowena
- Sidony
- Theodosia
- Tirzah
- Verena
- Winifred
- Yolande
- Zipporah
- Zosia
For boys
- Alban
- Anselm
- Barnabas
- Caedmon
- Casimir
- Cornelius
- Crispin
- Dunstan
- Ephraim
- Fenton
- Ferdinand
- Godfrey
- Horatio
- Ivo
- Jotham
- Kenelm
- Linus
- Merrick
- Mordecai
- Nevin
- Oswin
- Phineas
- Piran
- Redmond
- Rupert
- Septimus
- Silvanus
- Tarquin
- Tiberius
- Ulric
- Valerian
- Wendell
- Wystan
- Zebedee
- Zephaniah
Pairing rule: say the name once to somebody who has never seen it written. If they can repeat it back, it is usable anywhere. If they ask you to spell it, it is still usable in the middle — but it is no longer usable as a first name, and that is worth learning before the birth certificate rather than after.
Keep browsing
Adjacent styles: unique middle names for distinctive-but-familiar, vintage for the names that came back, royal for the ones that stayed in the court records, and literary, which rescued half this page. The Celtic entries are drawn out further under Welsh origin names. See also middle name traditions worldwide, or return to all 22 styles.