Rule things out first, choose second
The most common starting mistake is hunting for the perfect name among thousands. It is exhausting and goes nowhere: with five thousand options, any shortlist is arbitrary. It works far better in reverse — set two or three criteria that are genuinely non-negotiable for you, and let the catalogue shrink on its own.
Useful ruling-out criteria tend to be few and very concrete: that it isn't shared with someone close in the family, that it doesn't start with the same letter as a sibling if that bothers you, that it has a certain length next to your surnames, or that it can be pronounced without explanation in the country where you'll live. Three criteria like these can take a list of two hundred names down to twenty, and twenty is a number you can actually think about.
Five checks worth running before you commit
- Say it out loud, in full, several times. First name and surnames together, the way a teacher will read it off a register. Plenty of names that look lovely on paper stumble against the first surname.
- Write the initials together. It's a ten-second check that almost always happens too late: some combinations spell words the child will hear about for years.
- Think about the nickname, not the name. In daily life almost nobody uses the full name. If you don't like the natural short form, that short form is the name you'll actually hear.
- Search for it. Check it doesn't collide with a heavily associated character, a well-known brand, or something unfortunate in the language of the other side of the family.
- Wait a week before calling it settled. Names you like only for their novelty fall away within days; the ones you still like after that tend to hold up.
What matters less than it seems
Two criteria take up enormous space in these conversations and then turn out not to decide much. The first is the etymological meaning. It's a lovely detail and it's often what makes you fall for a name, but it's worth remembering that virtually nobody who calls your child by their name will ever know that meaning. Picking a name whose sound you don't love because it means something beautiful usually ends badly.
The second is the extended family's opinion. Asking before you decide almost guarantees an argument: one name reminds someone of an unbearable colleague, another strikes a grandmother as odd. The least friction comes from deciding between the two people who will raise the child and announcing it once decided, rather than putting it to a vote.
When the two of you don't agree
This is the norm, and it doesn't get solved by arguing over each person's favourite, because that turns the decision into a contest. It works better to invert the mechanism: each of you proposes a list, and the other can only veto, without justifying. Whatever survives both vetoes is genuinely common ground.
If nothing survives, it usually means the underlying criteria differ — one of you wants something uncommon and the other something familiar, say — and that's the conversation to have, not the one about specific names. And there's always the compound name, which is precisely the solution Hispanic tradition has used for this problem for centuries.
A note on registration
Legal requirements for registering a name vary from country to country and change over time, so the only sensible thing is to check with the civil registry that applies to you before assuming anything. As general orientation, in most Spanish-speaking countries the margin is wide and rejections are exceptional, reserved for names that could be objectively harmful to the person.
If the name carries an accent, an ñ, or an unusual spelling, it's worth confirming exactly how it will be written on the registration: that's what the passport and every document afterwards will carry.