One of the most daunting tasks for any expecting parent is coming up with a name for the baby. It’s a lot of pressure, right? So when Jenny Slate and fiancé Ben Shattuck were deciding on baby names, they thought it might be smart to do a little research into their families’ heritages so they could find the perfect name for their little one.
On Wednesday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, Slate explains that she was fixated on an unusual name from Eastern Europe to match her family origins. “One name that we were both obsessed with was spelled b-a-g-r-a-t. And while I was pregnant we just kept calling her Bag Rat, which I’m sure is not how to pronounce that.”
Slate said she never intended to use the name permanently, but throughout her pregnancy, she referred to the baby as Bagrat. She said the name was likely something more beautiful than “me being like ‘Hey, Bag Rat, you made me throw up again.”
And she’s right. The name, which is derived from the Old Persian Bagadata, is pronounced bahg-RAHT and means “gift of God.” It was the name of 17 different Georgian monarchs and is still popular in some parts of Georgia and Armenia today.
Slate and Shattuck ended up going with a more conventional name though: Ida. The actress announced the birth of Ida Lupine in an interview with Entertainment Tonight this week, saying simply, “Yeah, I’m not pregnant anymore. The baby came out!”
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