I’ve been told that Mom and Dad considered naming me after the next female’s name who came on the radio they were listening to one night. Stella Dallas. No. That name wasn’t right for their first daughter. Instead of a baby name book, they went to a dictionary and briefly searched. Starlight. No, again. Not quite right. So, my dad, always fascinated by anything to do with outer space and science fiction, modified the name to Starla. Starla Kay Tolliver, in full.

Names interest me, especially having been a writer for over thirty years. Having published over 100 stories in one form or another, I have a very in-depth Excel spreadsheet list of character names I’ve used. It’s scary.

In a recent writing class I led, I did a program about names, first names, I’m one of those go-down-a-rabbit-hole researchers and went nuts with researching the names of the people in my classes. My two favorite resources were Behind the Name: the etymology and history of first names https://www.behindthename.comhttps://www.behindthename.com and Ancestry https://www.ancestry.com/first-name-meaning/https://www.ancestry.com/first-name-meaning/

Through these sites, I found out many things about first names: their origin, how they are pronounced, their historical meaning, related names and variants, the most common surname associated with them, the most common spouse’s name, the most common child’s name, and when the name was most popular.

In all these years of my life, I have run into very few other Starlas. The name was actually popular in the mid 1950s to mid 1980s. I was born in the 1950s. It is pronounced STAHR-la in American English, and STAH-la in British English. But I answer to almost anything, including “Hey you.”