Unique Baby Nicknames In Each State

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Ovia’s map shows the baby nicknames that are unique to each state, like Lone Ranger in Texas and Future President in Washington, D.C. Photo by Ovia. 

When I was pregnant, my husband, Matt, and I called our unborn daughter “Mo.” We used the name so much — “Do you think Mo will like this crib?” and “I hope Mo loves March Madness” — that our friends knew it and used the moniker too. There was no good reason for it. One night early in my pregnancy, Matt was at a casino and his poker dealer was named Mo. He called me and said, “I think we should call the baby Mo.” That was it. Until she was born, and officially named Maggie, she was Mo.

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Giving your unborn baby a nickname is a common practice. And a new map released Thursday by Ovia, an app aimed at helping women conceive by allowing them to track their menstrual cycles, shows just how unusual some of those nicknames can be.

When users sign up for Ovia, they are asked to give their baby a nickname. While most choose the default options of Bean, Peanut, and Baby, plenty of users get more original. Developers at Ovia collected data from over two million users to identify some of the nicknames that are specific to each state.

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Some, like the Texas nickname Lone Ranger or Future President in Washington D.C., make sense. Others, like Little Bloop in Delaware, Butterbutt in Kansas, or Smushface in Ohio, are more surprising. But Gina Nebesar, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Ovuline, the maker of the app, says there are regional trends to note. “For example, entire regions tend to enjoy creating unique names with similar base words, like ‘sugar’ in the South, ‘bean’ in the Northeast, and ‘bug’ in the Northwest,” she said in a statement provided to Yahoo Parenting.

If you’re looking for an unexpected nickname for your unborn baby, the Ovia map is full of suggestions. If you live in Nevada, perhaps you are carrying a Pork Bun. Parents in Colorado show their love of fast food with the nickname Happy Meal, while folks in Illinois continue to show their allegiance to deep dish with the nickname Pizza Bagel. Sports fans in Massachusetts forecast the future with the nickname Little Champion. And New Yorkers? They’re raising a bunch of little Troublemakers.

“In a way you give the unborn baby a silly name because your own idea of what he or she might be like is still being formed,” Pamela Redmond Satran, the author of The Baby Name Bible and creator of the Baby Name site Nameberry, tells Yahoo Parenting. “A lot of parents, even if they know what they want to name their child, they don’t want to share that with the world until after the child is born. Nicknames are a way of keeping the world at bay. It may also be a way of keeping your own ideas from getting to set about your child.”

Nicknames also stem from superstition, Satran says. “They keep a little bit of distance so you don’t tempt fate,” she says. “Before you can feel the baby move, before you’re showing, it feels unreal. Its kind of a joke — it’s a way of saying ‘this isn’t really a baby yet, this is a Bean.’”

Or a Happy Meal. Or Butterbutt.

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