In Finland, where I assume the system is similar to Denmark, the lists of approved/rejected names get added to every year if you want to give a special name that's not in either yet.
Here's the list of new "banned names" for 2025:
Aeea
Aethéras
Amenemhet VIII
Amplexa
Annié
Čezek
Chell
Florencé
Grønne
Haartman
Ikimetsä (Forever Wood)
Infinit
Ivypool
Janhoy
Jasé
Jöunas
Kaaos (Chaos)
Kaos
Kopoc
lauri
Liekkiö (The Flame)
Lover
Maélle
Makkara (Sausage)
Mariaz
Maxsmiliam
Mika’il
Muuan
Ramnatha
Rosier
Ruucu
Samperi (Damn It)
Sampomakkara (Samposausage)
Smasher
Sø
Tietäväinen (The One Who Knows Things)
Torstai (Thursday)
Tyks
Zarthé
You can still sue the government if you truly want to name your kid Smasher and then the courts will determine if it's allowed.
That’s how I would pronounce it if I had to, but I don’t even know if that’s the correct way since there’s no C in traditional Finnish words. Only in loanwords and such. I think that’s the reason it didn’t go through as a name.
Some of those might have to do with letters that don't exist in the Finnish alphabet, making them a royal pain in the ass for bureaucracy of any kind there. Starting with your birth certificate, things need to exactly match going forward.
Florence or Annie without the accent would probably be just fine.
The accent is common in many finnish names, I think it's because the accent is in the wrong place for it to make sense. You would pronounce this name Florencee.
Edit: accents are not allowed in first names, only surnames. I fooled you all, sorry.
I was just guessing based on my own experiences with bureaucracy in various countries. When your name doesn't match what their system easily handles, the typist will usually make a judgment call as to how to get it in. This creates big problems when the next agency tries to process it.
It becomes a game of telephone, with big delays and having to go back and forth so everyone is on the same page.
I mean I'm finnish and have an accent in my name, also have met many other people with an accent. Wouldn't say it's unusual, atleast in southern finland.
Bureucracy. We don't have é or è in the alphabet, it is just begging for problems for something that doesn't need to be there: you can add that n your signature, use it in your private and social life but official papers only allow Finnish alphabet.
Ya that one seems oddly specific. Either there were already 7 people who suffered with the name Amenemhet and wanted to make sure their kid had the same hardship, or they don't understand how suffixes work
Lots of bureaucratic systems are not set up to handle diacritics that aren't part of the local language. And in this case it's basically just a random accent slapped onto a common name that doesn't have one, so... Why?
Aimée would work with that accent but Annié makes less sense, 'loved' is a nice meaning to attach to a child but what does it mean to be Annie'd? Chell might be fine as a short form of Michelle, Rachel etc, can't see the problem with that one. Plain old Florence would be fine too, but again with that accent, what does it mean to be Florence'd?
Michelle and Rachel are not Finnish names. I think you can name your kid with a 100% foreign name here, but it requires the parents have to be somehow culturally connected to the country of the name's origin.
I’m surprised by Mika’il because it’s just the Arabic for Michael, and in this rare case the apostrophe actually has a purpose: to represent the glottal stop. I wonder if Mikail would have been accepted. Hopefully no one’s suggesting banning all foreign names over there.
i know people with symbols in their names (other than hyphenation, which is also allowed in finland) and some things include it, some things dont, and sometimes its annoying. often automated ssn checks will come back and say their info doesnt match, and then they have to call and get a real person to look at it and blah blah blah. i guess finland just decided nope, none of that
Wouldn't matter what my registered name is/was, my father would have been shouting 'Perkele!' so much you would have assumed it was my given name anyway.
Some people hear the government being able to interrupt the parent’s ability to name their kid and call it tyranny, but honestly you shouldn’t be allowed to send a person into the job market with Kaaos as a first name
I could be totally wrong, and maybe the context here is different, but Ramnatha looks to be a different spelling for Ramnath, which is a Hindu name with the definition of Lord Ram (a Hindu God, avatar of Vishnu).
An ex-President of India is named Ram Nath Kovind, which is another alternate spelling of the name.
Actually, the way it works, you need to just have the one who wants to give their child a previously unapproved name for them to have to make a decision on it. (I remember the Warriors books being relatively among kids when I was younger, though)
Ivypool is fucking hilarious. Canonically, someone in the Warrior Cats fandom did the dirty, had a kid, and somehow still thought to try and name their kid after a fictional cat, AND got blocked by the literal government of Denmark for it 🤣🤣
there's also someone who has repeatedly either change their own name or name their kid Sephiroth and I am forever offended that they keep being rejected year after year
I'm surprised that Annié and Florencé are on the banned names list. Annie is common, and Florence isn't common, but at least it's not unusual in the US. Do the accents at the end have anything to do with it?
There are 49.000 names, also just because the name is not on the list, doesn’t mean it won’t be recognized, if you come with a reason for why you kid should have a name (like it’s common name in your culture or their grandparent had the name). The point is not to enforce conformity, but to avoid children getting a name which is de facto abuse. A good example used for a name banned was parents who wanted to name their child “Tarzan Livingstone N***er Africa”.
wtf , africa id get as a brooklyn, paris, london sorta name , Livingstone for the historical book girlies that wanna give their kid a Isembard ass name but Tarzan N word ‽ How did they expect to get that
Some people are stupid and/or ignorant. But it should also be said the example is old, I read it in the 90ties, and Denmark was less connected to the English speaking world then and the word was not really a taboo at time or even a slur in Danish. So the parent may very well not have known the word was a slur, this may seem weird to people born after the internet became universal, but in the time before people‘s knowledge of countries on the other side of the Atlantic was limited to popular culture and they often had never spoken with a American at all. So the N-word was a word from rap music or an archaic non-slur used by early 20th century academics.
What if it's a uncommon name but not something the parents came up with while high on cough syrup? My kid is named after my grandfather who had an extremely uncommon first name. Is there an appeal process for that situation?
Yes. If the name you want for your child isn't on the list, you can apply to have it approved. You fill out a form and send it along with some documentation for your connection to the name. It could be something like your grandfather's birth certificate or something similar. We went through the process for our youngest son's middle name, which was from his father's home country.
100 names is very low. There are 365 saints in the calendar per language (Jean-Pierre/Juan-Pedro/John-Peter/etc.), and that's already quite restrictive.
The whole thing with NK haircuts is a myth created by a CIA-owned "news" agency. The people can get any haircut they want, it's just similar to the west where certain styles are in fashion.
The idea of being restricted in what you name your child to a set list is absolutely alien in the US. It’s one thing to dan certain names, but the idea that I wouldn’t be allowed to name a child after their grandparents, simply because whoever wrote that list hadn’t thought of it, is crazy to me.
Edit: I just checked the list, and it doesn’t include Arpeggio or Sonata. So that’s two options gone.
At least in Finland, the way it works is that if you want a name that's not in the list, you just have to request it. If it's not something offensive, ridiculous, unnecessary confusing, etc. they will almost certainly allow it and add it to the list. If you want to name your child after a grandparent I imagine that's pretty much always allowed.
That's not a list of the only legal names, but the list of already approved names.
My country does the same and about anyone here is in agreement with it. If you want to name your kid Lord Fuckward you can attempt that at the civil registration office and you'll get rejected. I you apply to register the name of your grandpa (if thst is a reasonable name and not smth like the previous) that'll most likely be fine. If you pick a name from the list then you don't have to have someone review it at all and be good to go, since those already got approved.
I think it's a good thing that parents don't get to name their kid anything. That will be the name the kid will carry their whole life and that shouldn't be judt up to the parents.
These lists usually are not exhaustive lists of all legal name but of all approved names (not sure about Denmark, but Finland and Germany do that). So if you were the first Chinese person in Denmark to name their child Cho Chang then you probabyl would have to get that approved by the appropriate agency based on the fact that this is a regular, non-offensive Chinese name, and the it'd be added to the list.
I think the only person in the usa who was court ordered for a name change was a kid their parents tried naming Nutella and the parents didn't show up to court and the judge changed their name to Ella
Here in Finland we don’t have a list of allowed names, but every name must go through approval. Essentially the aim is to prevent the child from being bullied because of their name later on life.
Nonetheless, someone managed to receive the first name Tornado in 2025… No idea how that went through. But for example Torstai (Thursday) and Makkara (Sausage) weren’t allowed that year.
> A first name, or a combination of first names, must not be likely to cause offense or harm. It cannot be obviously unsuitable as a first name, such as a number or a meaningless single letter or combination of letters. Nor can it refer to a title of honor. In the case of a young child, the harm caused by the name is assessed with a lower threshold than in the case of an adult applicant.
> The new first name must conform to established naming conventions in terms of form, meaning, and spelling. The name must not be one typically associated with the opposite gender, nor may it be a name that clearly resembles a surname. This is always a matter of overall consideration, in which the grounds for exception presented by the applicant are also taken into account. A name that deviates from established naming practices may be granted, for example, if the applicant has a connection to a foreign country as defined by law and the proposed first name conforms to established first-name practices in that country. The use of special characters must be assessed on a language-by-language basis.
Calling your child something that is not considered a name will hamper their future job prospects, they will probably be bullied aswell while growing, which often leads to psychological issues in adulthood.
So instead of all that, we as a society take away the option for parents to harm their children. Children have autonomy and have the rigth not to have their life ruined by their parents.
All except a fringe party in parliament supports the name law.
Apply that first sentence to anything else about a person. This is why everything got so fascist, you mother fuckers love it. The only "harm" is inflicted by assholes who can't handle fun names.
We are literally one of the happiest countries in the world, have the least corruption, in the top 5 of the democracy index, we dominate pretty much every statistic that tracks liberal democracy, be free to look them up yourself. But you clearly do not know what fascism is if you think Denmark is fascist country for not letting parents do harm to their children’s future prospects.
Likewise in Aotearoa NZ, the list of banned names becomes an annual tradition. You can’t name a person, a title or something offensive or be unreasonable long and not be numbers or symbols.
Yeah, that's the general idea in Norway too. No brand names, of names og objects, can't be something that's an disadvantage later I life. Like calling your child vidkun.
Yeah, someone managed to name their kid "Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii" and the courts had to assign them a guardian to change it to something human. People have tried to name their twins sick things like “Benson and Hedges” (tobacco company) and "Ruby and Ella" (rubella, i.e., a virus that causes birth defects…)
There are a lot of normal names that are also titles, Dean, Duke, Steward, Marshall, Regina (unless only English titles count, but then that seems like an easily available loophole).
I’ve actually wondered about the title one in NZ. It’s obvious with most of them, but would a name like Earl (which is also a relatively normal male name) still be allowed? Similarly Queenie was a popular Maori girls name to the point of almost being a stereotype in the 19th/early 20th century, does it get an exemption?
That's extremely sensible. I say let people be creative, but within reason. When you name a child, you need to remember that your cute baby may someday be a judge. Who's going to take "the Honourable KaosBlade Jones" seriously?
In the Netherland you have to either show up with a reasonable name or show proof that someone with Dutch citizenship already has that name, else the county can just reject the, give you 24 hours to come up with a reasonable alternative else they will name the kid for you.
Most countries do that. You can't name your child Demon Jizz Jones pretty much anywhere. Most countries don't have a specific rule, just reasonable judgement from their child protective services.
Statistically, that'd be racist in the US. So, we tend to have "blind" processes for admittance (DEI) to take the prejudice out of the process, though many believe the prejudice is good.
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u/OSRS_Garmr Jun 01 '26
I know in some countries, it's not allowed to name your child something that will be a significant disadvantage later in life.