Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Mohammed likely to top British boys' names list by years end.

I kid you not.

Mohammed will likely become the most popular name for baby boys in Britain by the end of the year, The Times newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing government data.

Though official records from the Office for National Statistics list the spelling Mohammed 23rd in its yearly analysis of the top 3,000 names given to children, when all the different spellings of the name are taken into account, it ranks second, only behind Jack, according to The Times.

There are various different spellings of the name because when it is transliterated into English from Arabic, families spell it as closely to their own pronunciations as possible.