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Name Hunting
by My Dad, Afshin Sepehri
 Finding a nice name has always been a challenging task for parents-to-be and we were no exception. Like many other people, we started dreaming about our baby's name at a very young age. However, when it was time to come up with a name, many of our dreams did not work. Names we thought were appropriate were too long or too complicated to pronounce in United States, where our daughter was to be born. So, we decided to start name hunting from scratch. There were many parameters we needed to consider: Persian root, meaning, pronunciation, spelling and so on. After quite a bit of research, we decided to ask for help from our relatives and friends. Thankfully, because of the Internet, we had the privilege of getting the feedback from so many people about the baby names we had in mind. We developed a website and asked over 100 people to visit and rate names for us. We also asked them to make comments on names and give us new suggestions. A sample page can be seen here.
In the beginning, our approach caused a great deal of confusion. Some people thought it was a competition! We tried to explain our real intention and succeeded, to some extent! However, these misinterpretations discouraged us from sending invitation emails to other people that we wanted to visit the website. (You may have been one of them) However, our friends and relatives gave us more than enough information and made the process of name hunting a lot easier.
We gathered all the ratings, suggestions, and comments, some of which were really helpful. There are so many beautiful names which can be easily ruined by resembling them into some not nice words. Also, there are names which do not have nice meanings in other languages. We avoided these names after receiving this information from our website visitors. See a list of comments here. We also received about 150 name suggestions, many of them are really pretty and can be used by others. You can see the list of suggested names here. We also checked our list with people who spoke other languages such as English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Indian, and Korean.
And finally when it comes to taste, every name has its own flavor and everybody has his/her own distinct idea about a name. You cannot find two people with identical ratings. So, we referred to our own taste for the final decision.
'Nusha' was one of our favorite names suggested originally by Farangis on April 24, 2004 as the website log shows. It is also close to 'Nushin', my family's favorite name. While speaking to some of our American friends, we found out that names ending with 'a' are perceived as more feminine for those who have never heard them. So, we ended up choosing the name 'Nusha', which means 'Sweet' in Persian. It was ranked 5th among the 26 names we had in our rating list, showing its relative popularity. A complete summary of the ratings can be found here. About the spelling: 'Nusha', 'Noosha', 'Nuesha' and 'Nousha' were all options. 'Noosha' seems more familiar to Iranians but as we surveyed more people, writing it with 'u' seems more natural to Americans (plus it is shorter). There is still a chance of pronouncing it as 'Naasha' or 'Nioosha' which are also meaningful Persian names and we like them as well.
And finally the appreciation part. On behalf of my family, I would like to thank everyone who helped us by giving hints, suggestions, and comments. It is not surprising that some people do not like name 'Nusha' as much as we do, but we are confident that they will like it as time passes and after they meet our Nusha.
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