In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.
The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls’ names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.
Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional.
Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward.
2 thoughts on “And if It’s a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?”
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What confuses me is that if they want to give their child that sort of name, why CAN’T they just name her “Heaven”? Why do they want to disguise their intentions like that? What does it say about the kid that her name is spelled backwards? Is it some sort of tribute to The Da Vinci Code?
Remember when backwards-masking was fun?
Have you read any of Baby’s Named a Bad Bad Thing?