Odd Name Out / Real Life

• The United Kingdom of England, Scotland, (Northern) Ireland, and... Wales.
• Back in the 1910s, the White Star Line drew up drafts for three large ships that would all be named for, well, being large: Olympic was the first, then Titanic and finally Gigantic. After what happened to the second one, the company feared that releasing the third with the Theme Naming intact would cause people to associate it with the disaster, so the Gigantic was renamed to Britannic.
• For a long time, the fleet of the Finnish ferry operator Viking Line consisted of seven ferries: Amorella, Gabriella, Isabella, Mariella, Rosella, Cindarella, and... Ålandsfärjan. Today, the odd one out is Viking XPRS.
• The current US carrier fleet:
  • USS Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson et al., and the Enterprise as the survivor of the previous naming theme (however, this is justified in that the Enterprise is of a different class of ship than the others).
  • Going the other way, all the Ohio-class SSBNs are named after states except USS Henry M. Jackson, and all the Los Angeles class SSNs are named after cities except USS Hyman G. Rickover. The latter case is justified, as Rickover was generally regarded as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy", and even more to the point led the team that developed the Navy's first nuclear-powered subs.
  • With the current generation of SSNs, the Seawolf and Virginia classes, USS Seawolf is a throwback to the original submarine naming scheme that had been abandoned in the 1970s (prior to the Los Angeles class all attack subs were named after aquatic creatures). USS Connecticut begins the new scheme of naming them after states, but is immediately followed by an exception to the scheme with USS Jimmy Carter. The follow-on Virginia class are almost all named after states, with the exceptions of the 12th (John Warner) and 22nd (Hyman G. Rickover) that are named after people. With a total of 67 Virginia-class boats planned and only 50 states, obviously several more exceptions to the naming scheme will be required.
  • With the names of three (of ten expected) Gerald R. Ford-class carriers announced, ''Enterprise'' is once again an odd name out, with the other two being Gerald R. Ford and John F. Kennedy.
• The Duggar family from 19 Kids And Counting consisting of children Joshua, Jana, John-David, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Jossiah, Joy-Anna, Jedidiah, Jeremiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, Johannah, Jennifer, Jordyn-Grace, and Josie. Their father is Jim-Bob, their mother is... Michelle.
• Kanye West and Kim Kardashian have four children (girl, boy, girl, boy). Three of them have one syllable names: older girl North, both boys Saint and Psalm, while their youngest girl has a three syllable name, Chicago.
• Director Robert Rodriguez named his four sons the unique and rather badass sounding Rebel, Rocket, Racer, and Rogue. While he kept the "R" theme with his daughter, he gave her the much more normal-sounding Rhiannon.
• Not Always Right: Oh, that poor kid. His name is Jonathan James Kai'hoalaloai'u Johnson. Even his unnamed parent has trouble spelling his second middle name.
• The Marx Brothers: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, Gummo, and... Margaret.
• John, Paul, George, and Ringo, with Ringo replacing Pete; Ringo's real name is Richard, though.
• Paul McCartney's first wife, Linda McCartney - born Linda Eastman - had two younger sisters, Laura and Louise, and an older brother, John. ^note  Their parents were also named Lee and Louise.
• The Mulaney siblings: Chip, Carolyn, Claire, and John.
• Henry VIII's wives were: Catherine, Catherine, Catherine, Anne, Anne... and Jane.
• The Phoenix siblings: River, Rain, Liberty, Summer, and... Joaquin. (When he was a child, Joaquin asked to be named Leaf, so he could be like his siblings, and he was credited as such in his first roles. He later reverted back to his birth name.)
• The members of Super Junior and subgroups: Leeteuk, Kangin, Kibum, Hangeng, Siwon, Heechul, Eunhyuk, Donghae, Sungmin, Ryeowook, Yesung, Shindong, Kyuhyun, Zhou Mi... and Henry. After HanGeng a.k.a HanKyung left, Zhou Mi also fits this trope, being the only one with a Chinese name. Their label mates, the girl group f(x), also fit this trope. Victoria, Amber, Luna, Krystal and... Sul-Li.
• After The Rev died, Avenged Sevenfold consisted of M. Shadows, Synyster Gates, Zacky Vengeance, Johnny Christ and... Arin Ilejay. Brooks Wackerman has no stage name, but his real name could be mistaken for one.
• Physics:
  • The main branches of classical physics are mechanics, optics, acoustics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. Not only does the latter one end with a different syllable, but it refers implicitly to two forms of energy (electricity and magnetism) instead of one.
  • In quantum and particle physics, the different 'flavours' of quarks are (listed in groups of two) down and up, bottom and top, and strange and charm. In older textbooks you'll sometimes see truth and beauty, strange and charm, and up and down.
• In the periodic table of elements, the noble gases are helium, neon, krypton, argon, xenon, radon, and oganesson. Helium is named like that because it's a direct translation from the Greek word helios (Sun).
• The SI base units: meter, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, candela, and kilogram. That last one is the only one to have an SI prefix in the name of the base unit itself, which is The Artifact from when it was first named, during the French Revolution.^note The unit of mass was originally going to be called the "grave", but since "margrave" is a title of nobility, that changed real quickly.
• The solar system:
  • In several languages, Earth is the only planet in the Solar System that is not named after a Greco-Roman god. And nope, "Terra" (Roman name for Mother Earth) will not help either. In the case of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, all the planets' names end in 星 (-xīng, -sei, -seong, "star/planet") except for Earth (地球, Dìqiú, Chikyuu, Jigu, "earth-ball").
  • Uranus was named after a Greek god (the others were named after Roman gods), and while most moons named for figures associated with the parent planet's namesake, Uranus has moons named after Shakespeare characters, though the first Uranian moons to be discovered were specifically named after air spirits. And before even getting this one name, it was almost named George (after King George III) or Herschel (after William Herschel, the man credited with its discovery in 1781). Since Uranus was the first planet to be discovered using modern technology, it took a little while to come up with a standard for naming conventions.
  • Neptune is also a break in the naming pattern of the giant planets. The other three are named for the fathers of the preceding planets' namesakes; Jupiter is Mars's father, Saturn is Jupiter's father, and Uranus was named for the Greek counterpart of Saturn's father specifically to keep this pattern going. However, this pattern couldn't be continued when an additional planet was found because Uranus/Caelus doesn't have a father in mythology, so Neptune was named after one of Jupiter's brothers instead. The fact that it's blue helped.
  • Almost all of Jupiter's moons are currently named after women associated with the mythical figure, mostly his lovers. The major exception is the largest moon, Ganymede, which is named after his male lover.
  • All Kuiper Belt objects are deliberately named for deities that are not Greek or Roman, with two exceptions. Pluto and its moons are grandfathered in from Pluto's stint as the solar system's ninth planet. An exception was also made for Eris and its moon due to Eris's brief stint as the tenth planet, and because the Goddess of Discord was just too fitting not to use considering the havoc its discovery caused.
• The Earth's continents are named Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, the two Americas, and Europe; the last one's name starts and ends with a different letter in English. In Japanese, Antarctica is the odd one out, as it's the only one whose name is regularly written entirely in kanji.
• The four provinces of Ireland are Ulster, Munster, Leinster, and Connacht (or Connaught).
• Earth's geologic periods:
  • The Paleozoic is made up of Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian periods. Not only is Carboniferous the only one whose name does not end with -an, it is also the only one not named after a region or people (it was coined from the Latin words for "bearing coal", referencing the coal beds that were formed during this period). However, the Carboniferous is sometimes split into Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, averting this trope.
  • The three periods that made up the Mesozoic era are called the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous.
  • Similarly, the periods of the Cenozoic are the Palaeogene, Neogene, and Quaternary.
• The names of the seven days of the week feature this in many languages:
  • For six of the seven days, English names are of Germanic origin, with Monday and Sunday respectively named after the sun and the moon and the others named after Anglo-Saxon gods - except Saturday, which is named after the Roman god Saturn. It's even more of an oddball in the Scandinavian languages, where Saturday is named Lørdag/Lördag, which comes from the old name laugardagr. It means cleaning day/bath day.
  • In Portuguese, meanwhile, the odd ones out are the days of the weekend. While weekdays are called Segunda-feira (Second Fair/Monday) through Sexta-feira (Sixth Fair/Friday), Saturday is called Sábado (from Sabbath) and Sunday is Domingo (from (dies) dominicalis, "the Lord's day"). Another exception could be made for Tuesday, since it uses an older form of the word third, (Terça-feira, as opposed to Terceira-feira).
  • In China, Sunday is the odd one. The names for Monday through Saturday all correspond with the Chinese number for what day of the week it is (Monday is 1, Tuesday is 2, and so on), but Sunday uses the Chinese word for "sun", instead of 7.
  • In French, Sunday is again the odd one. Lundi (Monday) through Samedi (Saturday) all end in "-di," which effectively means day (they use an etymologically different word for day in modern French), but Sunday opts to instead start with "Di-," fully "Dimanche."
  • In Germany, "Mittwoch" (Wednesday; literally "mid-week") is the only one not ending on "-tag" (day)... if you use "Samstag", not "Sonnabend" (that's regionally dependent).
  • In Finnish, the only day name not to end on "-tai" is "keskiviikko" (Wednesday).
  • In Persian, Friday is this two times over. Its native Persian name, Adine, is the only one that is not measured from how close it is to Saturday (Saturday is called "Shanbe", and every day afterward is counted from it, so Sunday is "Yekshanbe" (one after Shanbe), Monday is "Doshanbe" (two after Shanbe), etc.). It also has an Arabic name, Jom'e, the only one among them.
  • In Malay/Indonesian, "Minggu" (Sunday) is the only one whose name is rooted in a European language (specifically, it came from Portuguese "Domingo"), rather than Arabic like the rest. It does, however, have an alternative Arabic name, Ahad.
• In Turkish, the names for the twelve months of the year are mostly derived from native Turkish (Ocak, Ekim, and Aralık for January, October, and December, respectively), Aramaic (Şubat, Nisan, Haziran, Temmuz, and Eylül for February, April, June, July, and September, respectively), and Latin (Mart, Mayıs, and Ağustos for March, May, and August, respectively). The only exception is November, whose Turkish name, Kasım, is derived from Arabic.
• The University of California, San Diego is split into six colleges (which basically entails different general education requirements, generally with some vague theme to each college's curriculum): Revelle, Muir, Marshall, Warren, Eleanor Roosevelt, and...Sixth. This is just a placeholder until they do decide on a name, but it's already been ten years... ^noteThough it should also be noted it also took a long time to settle on "Marshall College", and it was known as "Third College" for quite a while. How long? Twenty-three years.
• The Rugby Championship is played between Australia, Argentina, South Africa, and New Zealand. Each national team has a nickname. They are, respectively, the Wallabies, Los Pumas, the Springboks... and the All Blacks.
• The four nucleotides of RNA are adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil. DNA replaces uracil with thymine, making adenine the odd one out as the only one starting with a vowel.
• In the English alphabet, the letter W is the only letter with more than one syllable in its name.
• In English and German, seven is the only digit whose name has more than one syllable.
• Adolf Eichmann had four sons: Klaus Eichmann, Horst Adolf Eichmann, Dieter Helmut Eichmann, and Ricardo Francisco Eichmann. The latter one was born after 1945.
• The casinos on the Las Vegas Strip have honored seven individuals by dimming their lights for several minutes following their deaths. They are Elvis Presley, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, George Burns, Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles... and former UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian.^note Tarkanian (who died in 2015) was honored between Sinatra (1998) and Rickles (2017). A few months after Rickles' death, the Strip casinos also dimmed their lights as a memorial to victims of a mass shooting in which a gunman fired from a Strip hotel at people attending an open-air concert next to the Strip. The casinos also dimmed their lights on the first anniversary of said shooting, and will presumably continue to do so on further anniversaries.
• The four brackets of the NCAA Basketball Tournament are named East, South, West... and Midwest. Somewhat justified in that all of the names are traditionally used for U.S. regions, and "North" has almost never been used in this sense, at least not since the Civil War. Many of the states that might be called "North" are in the traditional Midwest.
• The regions of Chile have displayed this trope in two different ways:
  • Each region was given a Roman numeral, followed by a name—except for the Santiago Metropolitan Region, home to the country's capital. That region is instead given the designation RM.^note Spanish: Región Metropolitana The Roman numerals were officially removed from the naming system in 2018.
  • As for the names themselves, all befit a Spanish-speaking country, except for the one named after revolutionary leader Bernardo O'Higgins.
• In Central Massachusetts, there are the adjacent towns (in clockwise order): Southborough, Westborough, Northborough, and Marlborough. Nowhere in the state is there an Eastborough.
• Queen Victoria's sons: Albert (later Edward VII), Alfred, Arthur, and Leopold.
• At the Smithsonian National Zoo, a family of Asian small-clawed otters are named Chowder, Clementine, Pork Chop, Pickles, Saffron, Olive, Peaches, Turnip, Radish, Rutabaga, and Kevin. Whole Foods Market sponsored the naming.
• Somewhat famously, Starbucks Coffee doesn't serve "Small", "Medium", and "Large" drinks. Instead, an extra large 24 oz. drink is "Trenta", a 20 oz. drink is "Venti", a 16 oz. drink is "Grande", and a 12 oz. drink is... "Tall". There's actually a reason for that: the chain's smallest drink size (8 oz.) used to be called "Short", and "Tall" was the next size up. ^note  You can still order a Short drink, but the size is no longer listed on the menu. Overlaps with Artifact Title, since "Tall" is now the smallest size on the menu.
• The four Wallach siblings: Sam, Sylvia, Shirley... and Eli. Shirley was the youngest, but still.
• The men's 4x100m relay at the 2016 Olympics saw an example of this with silver medalists Japan. Ryota Yamagata ran leadoff, followed by Shota Iizuka, Yoshihide Kiryu... and Asuka Cambridge. The last of these has a Jamaican father and Japanese mother.
• All major routes on the U.S. Numbered Highway System (the precursor to the more modern Interstate Highways) have either one or two digits, with even numbers running north-south, odd numbers running east-west, larger numbers to the west or south respectively, and three-digit routes reserved for spurs or loops. The exception is US Route 101, which is a major north-south highway that's farther west than the now-defunct US 99. In this case, the technical "first digit" of the route is 10.
• Interstates are numbered in a pattern similar to the U.S. highways, albeit with the directions reversed (i.e., larger numbers to the east or north) and the added stipulation where multiples of 5 are reserved for major routes. However, this creates two cases of Odd Name Out:
  • Interstate 99, which runs north-south across the center of Pennsylvania, squarely between interstates 79 and 81. (For comparison, Interstate 95 traverses roughly along the East Coast from Miami to the Maine/New Brunswick border, and Interstate 97 is a 20-mile stub in Maryland connecting Annapolis and Baltimore. To fit in the grid, Interstate 99 would have to be east of even that.)
  • Interstate 238 is a two-mile stub in the San Francisco Bay Area, connecting Interstates 580 and 880. Typically, three-digit Interstates are spurs or loops from the "parent" route (so for instance, Interstate 580 is a spur from Interstate 80). However, there is no Interstate 38, and if there were, it would be just south of Interstate 40 (which runs from Barstow, California to Raleigh, North Carolina, therefore a considerable distance from the Bay Area). The oddball numbering is because it was previously designated as California State Highway 238, and the California Department of Transportation wanted to make it an interstate but had no other x80 numbers available. (480 was later made available when the Embarcadero Freeway collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but the numbering remained.)
• National Football League:
  • For a season and a half (2019 through November 2020), the head coaches in the NFC North division were Matt Nagy (Chicago Bears), Matt Patricia (Detroit Lions), Matt LaFleur (Green Bay Packers)... and Mike Zimmer (Minnesota Vikings).
  • There's the Watt brothers. Consisting of T.J., J.J., and... Derek.
• Following the National Football League's Washington Redskins renaming themselves, successively, the "Washington Football Team" and "Commanders" (the latter of which makes sense for D.C., as it is, after all, the home of the Commander-in-Chief, also known as the President of the United States), combined with the Washington Nationals and Washington Capitals, the Washington Wizards became the only professional sports team out of the Big Four in the Washington area not to continue the "national capital" theme.
• Bernarr Macfadden and his third wife had eight children: Byrne, Byrnece, Beulah, Beverly, Brewster, Berwyn, Braunda and Helen.
• The main Disneyland-styled parks of the Disney Theme Parks consist of Disneyland Park, Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris^note formerly Euro Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland, Shanghai Disneyland and… Magic Kingdom. The odd name is due to Early-Installment Weirdness, as Magic Kingdom is only the second of the Disneyland parks, and the trend of calling the parks Disneyland didn't become an established trend until Tokyo Disneyland's opening in 1984. Walt Disney World is also the only Disney resort to have "Walt" in the resort's name, as it was added In Memoriam of Walt Disney, who had died five years before that resort's opening.
• The seven words that begin a question: who (a person), what (an animal or an object), where (a place), when (an event), why (a reason), which (multiple subjects), and how (a process).