I have to admit to being upset by the claim that this book is a knockoff of 50,001 Best Baby Names (and the piddly single star rating as a result), given that the first edition of Lansky's book was published in 1979, and the first edition of 50,001 in 2005. My 1984 edition does include multiple lists of the type to which MOM is referring.

I was astonished when I saw the updated copy of this book -- my skinny 1984 ed. has only 13,001 names! When I flipped through the newest edition in search of the obscure names I tend to like (like another reviewer's husband, I am a writer), I was thrilled to find most of them, in addition to more common names.

I also own Sherrilyn Kenyon's Character Naming book, and I have to say that the new version of The Very Best Baby Name Book may have it beat. My biggest complaint about Kenyon's book is that while it includes Hebrew and even a (very) few Sanskrit names, it is almost completely devoid of any Asian-based names (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, among others). Lansky includes lists of popular names from around the world -- from Canada to Russia to China to Kenya. Though Kenyon's book does categorize names based on nationality, it can be a little mind-numbing to page through the same names in nationality after nationality, so it's nice to have another reference with the more traditional alphabetical approach (and nationality of origin is included for each name).

I have also used websites that contain databases of thousands of names, and I adamantly believe that buying a book like Lansky's is *well* worth the money. Online databases, while useful, are riddled with advertisements and popups; typically the list of names fills only a tenth of the page, leaving you paging through short list after short list and spending as much time clicking and scrolling as you do reading names. Lansky's book is a compilation of lots of sites of this sort, and a must-have for any writer's (or future parent's!) shelf.

This book "copied" the idea of the fun lists in the book 50,001 Best Baby Names. Not good!

As I have bought the earlier and thinner edition of this book I am amazed at what how much better this edition is.This book gives you the rules for naming your baby.Yes,there are rules for naming baby's.Dont want your baby being the local idiot just because you dont know how to pick out a name.

This book will give you guidelines on what to do and what NOT to do.This book will show you how some names have become less popular almost non existant over the decades.

This book is all about giving your baby its own identity and personality,and why.Covers the most important factors when deciding a name for your baby.This book tells you what you need to know.Even has several pages of famous names and their REAL names.

The only thing I dont like about this edition is the poor quality of paper it was printed on.Very poor quality.Thats the only thing wrong with this book.

I recommend these baby names books too:
1)"Whats wrong with every name in the book:dont name your baby".By David Narter.
2)"The baby name wizard" By Laura Wattenburg.
3)"The numerology of names". By Laureli Blythe.(if you can find a copy,grab it).

I write short stories and my husband is a novelist, so we are always on the lookout for good names for our characters. If we see a good name in a newspaper or meet someone who has a good name, we write it down. For example, I just met a car salesman named Donovan Smith. What a cool name, so it's in my handy, dandy, little notebook. However, we write a lot and we're not going to find all the names we need that way. Besides, we don't want to get sued, so generally we make them up and for help doing that we turn to three reference books, books that will make the life of any writer of fiction a tiny bit easier.

I suppose every writer knows about Sherrilyn Kenyon's CHARACTER NAMING SOURCEBOOK. Ms. Kenyon's book starts out with a short chapter on the craft of naming, then she goes right into the name lists, giving her readers lists of all kinds of names from Anglo-Saxon to Welsh with thirty-three others thrown in in between, like Armenian, Celtic, Danish, Dutch and plenty more. She gives us both male and female names and their meanings and that's handy for giving good guys and bad guys names, because you can give your villains dark sounding mysterious names. This book is a must for writers. I really believe that.

Basil Cottle's DICTIONARY OF SURNAMES is also an excellent resource for finding names that we turn to a lot. Where else would you find surnames like Icemonger, Inger or Iorwerth. Great names here. However, I should say that there are only names here that have originated in the British Isles. There are a whole lot of them though, along with an excellent introduction of surnames and how they came to be. Mr. Cottle also gives us a brief history and meaning of every name. This book, like the one I mentioned above, is also a must for fiction writer.

And lastly there is THE VERY BEST BABY NAME BOOK, by Bruce Lansky, which we also turn to a lot. I may seem silly, at first, for a serious writer to include this book along with the first two books, but babies grow up and they keep their names. And there are 30,001 names in this book, names from everywhere in the world along with a few facts about many of the names. My husband the novelist actually uses this book more than the others. If you write a lot, then you should have this book too.

If you have all three of these books in your writer's arsenal, then you'll never need to look any further for a name, though good names often turn up in the most unlikely of places, so I'd keep that handy, dandy, little notebook if I were you.

All three books reviewed in one review by Vesta Irene

This is the only book I bought when I was pregnant with my daughter and the only one I am using now to find a name for baby #2. This is a great book if you enjoy searching through names and their variations. I wanted to see as many realistic names as possible and I knew I wanted an uncommon, but not weird, name. It also lists the ethnicity of the name and its variations. My only complaint (and I have an old version of the book, so this may have changed) is that the book does not lay out the pronunciation of the names. Overall, I love this book and searching through it.