Even if your baby is not an intellectual there are some name out there that can make him or her sound like one. First off you could consider naming your child after some of the smartest people in the world. There is Noam (after Noam Chomsky), Umberto (after Umberto Eco), Vaclav (after Vaclav Havel), Jared (after Jared Diamond), Salman (after Salman Rushdie), Bjorn (after Bjorn Lomborg)
For the girls you can try Naomi (after Naomi Klien), Joan (after Joan Didion), Ivanka (after Ivanka Trump and Camille (after Camille Paglia.)
The literature of the U.S. South is also a great source of names and so is their authors. Try Scout or Atticus from 'To Kill a Mockingbird. For a bit of Southern elan name your child Truman, Eudora, Flannery or Carson.
You can also name your baby girl after famous female achievers in business and politics. The names Condoleeza, Oprah, Gayle, Sarah and Hilary are appropriate. For boys there are names such as Edgar, Johnson, Kennedy, Robert, Reagan, George, Washington, Franklin, Luther, Martin and Napoleon.
If you want your baby to have a traditional name that has a bit of an academic reference yet is also somewhat poetic then look no further than the works of Shakespeare. Portia, Ariel, Viola, Ophelia and Katherine are Shakespearean names for girls and Mercutio, Brutus, Horatio and Claudius are great Shakespearian names for boys.
Sticking to great names from English literature can also be beautiful, yet smart sounding. Examples are Robert, Langston, Ulysses, Quentin, Dante, Barrett, Ezra, Langston, Stewart and Mary, Shelly, Elizabeth, Jane, Charlotte and Sylvia.
One tip for making your baby sound smarter is to add a son to the end of the name as in Jackson Pollock, or Anderson Cooper. You could also name your child after a real genius. You could name your boy Akrit after Akrit Jswal who is a 7 year old surgeon or Saul or Aaron after Saul Aaron Kripke who is one of the youngest geniuses at Harvard. There is also Fabiano after the chess genius Fabiano Luigi Caruanna.
You can also try naming your baby after famous intellectuals in literature. There is Holden, after the main character in Catcher-in-The Rye. The pop-culture version might be Blaine from the B-movie starring Molly Ringwald called Pretty-in-Pink.
Then there is the sitcom approach as well. The sitcom Frasier is a rich source of these names because there are a lot of uppity 'eggheads' on the show including Lilith, Meredith, Frasier and Niles.