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I admire the name as well. It's a delicate, vintage name that I've always found to be adorable. It's one of a few names I would seriously consider using, although only as a middle name.

A cousin on my husband’s side named his son Stanley a few years ago. It’s not an unpleasant or shocking name by any means, but I recall people finding it hard to get used to on a little baby. It seems more useable as a middle name these days.

I know a 9 year old named Stanley Jr. and it seems old for both him and his dad.

I personally wouldn’t use it (maybe for a pet! I love human names for pets…) but I’d LOVE to meet a little Stanley!

It's not hideous but it's not that great either. Nowadays kids are very familiar with Flat Stanley so any Stanley is liable to be called that at least sometimes. And the nn Stan is liable to get called Stan the Man even by people who don't know about the baseball player Stan Musial.

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I have a good friend whose family is of Polish descent, came over in the early 1900s. Apparently the name Stanley was so common among Polish-American males (probably at least partly due to it being an Americanization of Stanislav) that in places with a large Polish population, a Stanley was a generic term for a Polish man. They also used the nn Stash, pronounced Stosh, and that also became a generic and not especially polite term for a Polish man. When my friend was making his family tree, there were so many Stanleys and Stanislavs (many with the same last names; you'd be surprised how many Stanley Kowalskis there were; Tennessee Williams obviously didn't think very hard when naming his character) that he several times got totally unrelated people mixed up in his charts.

I adore this name. I think it sounds strong and manly.