Ryan

Ryan is yet another first name that comes from a surname. In this case the surname is Ó Riain, which is Gaelic, and itself means "descendant of Rian." So a first name that came from a surname that came from a first name. Isn't it great how names recycle themselves like that? Ryan is an extremely popular name among new parents in the United States these days. Ryan has been a top twenty baby name for boys every year since 1990. This means there are a lot of young Ryans out there. If you are expecting a baby boy and looking for the perfect name, I'd hesitate before naming him Ryan for that reason. Parents of baby girls apparently haven't wanted to be left out of the Ryan-frenzy entirely--the name has been given to new baby girls since the 1970's, but the popularity of Ryan as a girl's name does not seem to be rising. However, it seems that a given number of parents do name their daughters Riane or Rianne or some other variation of Ryan. This is fine but in a lot of these cases they want to use these as variant spellings and keep the pronunciation of Ryan. If you really want to do this, it's your kid, but consider the fact that not many people are going to see Rianne and automatically assume it's pronounced like Ryan. So your daughter will spend a lot of her life correcting people who mispronounce her name. I do know of one couple who chose Ryane as their feminine version of Ryan and so far that's worked out just fine. Worth consideration.