Beyond Shannon and Sean: An Enlightened Guide to Irish Baby Naming

I have found a lot of great boy and girl names that are so different then the typical popular names like Brian, Ryan, Kevin, Shannon, Kelly, Erin, etc, and I highly recommend this cool book!

The book has very minor flaws but I love it anyway and give it five stars for everything that is right about this book!


Beyond Shannon and Sean: An Enlightened Guide to Irish Baby   August 23, 2003
3 out of 6 found this review helpful

This book is terrible. It is hard to follow and the sequence is illogical. There is no section that simply lists names and meanings...everything is chopped up into silly little chapters. All in all, this book offers little new information. I got a better list of Irish names from a regular baby name book.


Entertaining, Yes, Helpful, No!   May 28, 2003
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

This book is entertaining and makes a great conversation piece among my Irish relatives and friends but I have to be honest and admit that it's not very helpful or pratical with it's pronunciations or advice and I will be looking into buying some of the other Irish baby name books out there.


Very useful despite minor flaws   May 5, 2003
Lilly Williams (GTA, Ontario)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful

This book is much better than you would gather from reading the reviews. Although it's true, the pronunciations are not always correct, the book is an excellent source of interesting Irish names. There's also a section of names that are not used in Ireland for humans but which might appeal to people looking for an Irish-sounding name. The book also offers some historical perspectives not in other naming books.

Since Irish is a tough language to pronounce merely by looking at Irish words, it might be a good idea to get a brief overview of the language before wading through the names. It'll help with pronunciation. If you can't be bothered (who has the time?!), just double-check a name you like with a more official Irish source. That's what I do & it's no big deal. I really like the way the book is organized and I enjoy the extra info so it's well worth the price I paid for it, despite its few flaws.

This pair of authors has several other charming naming books. If you're a writer (or a pretender, like me), their little books are very handy.


Disappointing and Frustrating!   March 23, 2003
4 out of 12 found this review helpful

Having Irish roots and also being interested in names I bought this book when I saw it in an Irish book display in a bookstore while I was shopping on St. Patrick's Day a few years ago and it looked good and I thought now wouldn't this be an interesting book for my collection of Irish books and maybe I will find some nice Irish names for any future children but the book though maybe having an interesting title is actually disappointing when it comes to the reading of the content, there are a lot of names and hardly any pronunciations are given and the few that are I have been told are incorrect and that makes picking a nice unusual Irish name that isn't used alot in the US very difficult if you don't know what the proper pronunciation is, in fact I totally fell in love with the name Mairead but only got embarrassed when I found out from some people from Ireland and Scotland that the two pronunciations this book gives for Mairead including the May Read pronunciation are wrong and they told me that the correct pronunciation of Mairead actually rhymes with Parade and even though I now like the correct pronunciation I am still a little disappointed that the May Read pronunciation is incorrect but I still would have liked to not have gotten the wrong facts about the pronunciation and felt embarrassed. I hope to find an Irish name book that gives pronunciations and meanings of the names, I actually think every name book Irish or the ones that include all different kinds of names should include pronuncitions and phonetically spell them out like in a dictionary. I rate the book 2 stars but really would give it 2 1/2 stars because there are some things in the book I like including the lists of Irish Saint names but the lack of info and the incorrect pronunciations prevent me from giving it 3, 4 or 5 stars.