hrj

I regularly get random e-mails from people asking me what their name means (or what their kid's name means), which can get amusing. I got one today from someone whose niece got named "Peren" because the parents liked the sound, and the only place he could find the name on-line was one of my web articles so did I know what it meant? So I gave the whole spiel about how we don't always know the meanings of names and how relatively short simple names like this may show up coincidentally in multiple languages, so if they picked it just by the sound there may not even be a reason to assume that it's Welsh just because there's an identically-spelled name in Welsh sources. Yadda yadda yadda. So he tells me they picked the name from the lists at babycenter.com.

Guess who did some consulting work for babycenter.com and expanded and corrected their Welsh listings? (Peren is listed there as "meaning uncertain" and I haven't managed to get any more certain about it in the mean time, alas.)