Illustration by Barry Falls

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare asked. “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

I’m wondering if he had that same nonchalant approach toward naming his characters. Can you imagine if Juliet had been Joan? Or Romeo were forever Rob?

And how about naming his own three children — Susanna, Judith and Hamnet? Would any appellation do? Or did he and Anne (with an ‘e,’ of course) spend hours musing over whether their son’s personality would be better enhanced as Hamnet or McDuff?

Certainly today’s parents don’t go with the rose-is-a-rose theory of baby names. It’s part of the fun of a pregnancy, tossing around all those possibilities, literally giving a name to what is still a hope and an abstraction.

For some it’s a process that continues after the baby is born when the name chosen in utero just doesn’t seem to fit. (That happens to writers, too. Margaret Mitchell’s main character was named Pansy O’Hara up until the last draft of “Gone With the Wind,” when she became Scarlett.) Last year, the blogger Kelcey Kintner wrote about looking at her 1-month-old daughter and thinking:

“This baby is absolutely, definitely not a Presley.” Oh man. We gave our kid the wrong name. But I said nothing. I just figured I would get used to it. Presley just needed to grow into her name. Or I needed to grow into it. Or something. My husband, along with our family and friends, would call her Presley and I would just bristle in silence. Although in all fairness, you really can’t blame them because that was her name. I pretty much just called her “the baby” or sometimes tried out names like Harlow or Harper when no one was around. Months passed. And then one day, I ever-so-casually mention to my husband, “Hey, what do you think about us changing Presley’s name?”

At the age of eight months, Presley’s parents started calling her Summer. It took six visits to civil court but now the government calls her that too. (By the way, Kinter, who has written for Motherlode about the stress of secondary infertility, is expecting twins this summer. No word yet on their names.)

“She’s not a Presley” is one form of name regret. “We didn’t name her after Paris Hilton,” is another. When Amy Graff named her daughter in 2003, she had never heard of the socialite, whose sex tape did not debut online until a year later. When it did, Graff wrote last month at babycenter.com:

My baby girl’s carefully chosen cool and unusual name seemed forever tarnished. Hilton did little to salvage her reputation. There was the D.U.I., some time spent in jail and the nude photographs for the champagne print-ad campaign. I tried my hardest to block this all out and stopped reading In Touch in line at the grocery store, but the countless comments by family, friends and complete strangers who were convinced that there must be some relation between my daughter and a skanky socialite led me to feel intense baby name regret.

A 2007 survey by BabyCenter found that 3 percent of parents feel such regret and would change their baby’s name if they could. (Well, technically, as Kinter showed, they can, but I suspect they mean if they could without messing up their child in the process.)

Other causes of second thoughts? Constant misspelling and mispronunciation is one. Unexpected or unintended nicknames is another. New information can change your feelings about a name — a friend named her daughter after a great-grandmother, only to learn that most of the family thought the woman had probably murdered her first husband. The girl now goes by her middle name.

And then there is the question of “copying” names — when you choose something perfect and your best friend or co-worker or sister-in-law announces they have made the same choice. As a reader asked me recently:

Does a family “own” a name just by being lucky enough to have their child first? My husband’s family is Jewish, and it is strongly against custom to name a child after a living family member, even a cousin. Part of my negative reaction, I know, comes from suffering through years of infertility, and worrying that one of my husband’s prolific siblings would “take” the name that my husband and I had chosen years before, chosen before we even got married, chosen years before those fertile people having babies right now had even met, let alone married. I understand family custom, but seriously, is it also taboo between friends? Is giving your child the same name as that of a friend’s child a rude thing to do? Should you have to ask a friend if it’s O.K. before naming your child with the same name as their child? What about co-workers? Is this something that should legitimately cause tension in the workplace?

She’s hoping that I will ask Motherlode will readers for their opinions, and I am. Or, perhaps, Shakespeare is. Dear readers, what’s in a name?