My friend's daughter is named Saoirse. One of her issues is when she tells people her daughter's name they say "Seesaw??"

SEER-cha, more or less. It defies phonetic spelling. That is how I would say it. But I think people will say SOW ir se

Watch this starting at 1:55. Even the actress Saoirse says her name is a ridiculous name.

Soar-see.

I agree that kids are used to unusual names, so if you love it you should use it. That said, we had a similar hard to spell, hard to pronounce family name that I really liked. We decided to use it as a middle instead of first and I'm glad we did. Having to correct spelling and pronunciation constantly just seemed like an annoyance and burden to me, and now that she's here, I think I would have gotten sick of it.

I think it is a nice sounding name, but she will have to correct people and spell it out her entire life. Yes, there are a lot of names used in this area that aren't of English origin, but most of them at least bear some phonetic resemblance to the spelling! This one may as well be written in hieroglyphs because other than the first letter there are no hints about where to go with it. If I had a friend or coworker named Saoirse I would remember it, but since I encounter it very infrequently, the pronunciation hasn't stuck with me yet.

Anonymous wrote:Why don't you just make up a phonetic spelling of the name?

What, and have DCUM trash OP for making up a name? I guarantee if she posted she was going to name her daughter Seersha (or whatever the correct pronunciation is) a host of biddies would say "you're making that up" or "if you're trying to go for the Irish name it's spelled Saoirse!"

Why don't you just make up a phonetic spelling of the name?

I know it's a real name, but can't figure out the pronunciation for the life of me. I feel like some of those Irish/Gaelic/Scottish names are harder than French.

I have relatives who named their daughter Saoirse. They have a thick Irish heritage on both sides of the family. They pronounce it SEER-sha. It is not such an uncommon name these days but obviously some people will need to learn how to pronounce it or spell it once they meet her.

I only learned how to pronounce it because I met an Irish woman with that name! Even then I had to remind myself and it took me a while to say it right off the bat. I thought it was Soirse like letter by letter phonetic So-er-see.

I think it's a beautiful name and you should use it if you want to. There are SO.MANY names with different origins these days, I don't think that it gives anyone too much pause to ask h w it's pronounced.

It's a beautiful name. I'm a teacher and have learned to pronounce many names, including Indian names with many letters: Shinidi, Abdullazi, etc. I had an Eoin one year too. It'll get butchered at times but once she introduces herself, people will get it.

Anonymous wrote:I would use it. I think it's a beautiful name and people will figure it out.

You may have people misspelling it but people misspell my common, "traditional", WASP name all the time. It's no big deal.

Yeah, who knew there were so many ways to spell Katherine (besides Catherine and Kathryn) ...

For such an ethnicity-specific name, so difficult to spell, I would not use it unless you actually are Irish. If so, go for it. Otherwise it seems kind of pretentious.

I would use it. I think it's a beautiful name and people will figure it out.

You may have people misspelling it but people misspell my common, "traditional", WASP name all the time. It's no big deal.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She's beautiful and doesn't seem to mind her name. Come on people - it's not that hard to learn something new like how to pronounce a name.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saoirse_Ronan

It's not hard for adults to learn something new like how to pronounce a name. Kids are mean though, and they will be incredibly mean when it comes to this name. I understand names having special meanings for parents and such, but this is just cruel to a child.

Kids these days, in this area, know how to pronounce much more variety of names than we did. I think you are underestimating them.