Could three very similar baby names be less a recipe for confusion than a way of building a tiny, instant community?
For Artisha Davis, a mother in New Orleans raising triplets, the concept began with a late-night scroll and a single word that resonated with unusual power. Davis came across “Daviane,” discovered it means “beloved,” and constructed from there developing Davianna and Davian as sibling names that mean the same thing but sound like close relations themselves. Now 13 months old, her children live in the world with names that reverberate one from the other, sometimes so similarly that the family roster needs a double take. “Everybody mixes them up. Even I mix up their names sometimes. I have to look and say, ‘Which kid is which?’” Davis said.
The mix-ups started early enough that Davis added other identifiers, too nicknames that emerged from the NICU days, when differences in appetite and temperament began to manifest before personalities had a chance to declare themselves through language. Fat Mama, Little Mama, and Little Man weren’t marketing campaigns; they were shorthand for a mother observing three babies grow into three individuals.
Davis did not come to the matching names as a curiosity. She is a twin, and she has experienced the bureaucratic humor that occurs with very similar naming: one letter’s difference between her name and her sister’s, and then the misrouted paperwork that followed. Very similar naming can strengthen a relationship and also produce a buzzing annoyance prescriptions, tickets, paperwork, and phone calls that do not always account for subtlety. In Davis’s account, the troubles did not diminish the sense that the names were a shared identity.
This struggle between connection and confusion is also reflected in studies of everyday slips of the tongue in conversational language. A study of over 1,700 individuals revealed that name-swapping among family members is a regular occurrence, and that it happens in predictable patterns rather than being a sign of memory issues, and was published in the journal Memory & Cognition. Cognitive scientist Samantha Deffler called it “a normal cognitive glitch,” one that usually retrieves the wrong name from the correct social group. The mind maintains a sort of family “folder,” and when one needs to summon assistance in a hurry groceries falling, shoes appearing and disappearing, toddlers making a break for it the mind might reach for the next name on the shelf. Similarity in pronunciation was also found to increase the chances of a switch, which means that well-integrated sibling groups might be especially prone to mix-ups if their names share prefixes, suffixes, or vowel sounds.
However, across the globe, similarity in names is not something to be avoided by accident it is designed. In some regions of China, Vietnam, and Korea, families have employed the use of generation names where brothers and cousins share a character as a way of identifying their lineage through generation poems that allocate characters to naming over several decades.
The idea is not to merge the children but to situate them within the family narrative that predates and will outlive them. In the United States, social media has introduced a new pressure: parents searching for a “set” that matches in looks and sound in a caption, holiday card, or classroom cubby row. Name consultant Colleen Slagen has written about how families today seek cohesion as proof of unity, but also says that having a sibling set is not the be-all because children spend most of their lives outside of it.
Her advice subtlety is the best policy correlates with the same neighborhood as the science: the more overlap, the more the brain’s filing system can go awry. The cohesion issue came up again when Davis’s fourth child was born, a baby girl named Devyn. “I didn’t want her to seem like she was on the other side of the world from them,” she said, explaining why she kept the opening letter and rhythm similar to her older siblings. In her family, the names accomplish what she wanted: they distinguish the children as separate, but connected three different ways of saying “beloved,” plus a younger sister who sounds like she belongs in the same sentence.
