Vin Diesel honors Paul Walker in naming his new baby girl

Vin Diesel has honored the memory of costar Paul Walker by naming his newest baby, a girl, after his late friend.

Yes, a girl named Paul -- sort of. Diesel and girlfriend Paloma Jimenez will call their daughter Pauline. So Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively can safely sit on that gender-bending baby-name crown for a while.

“There’s no other person that I was thinking about as I was cutting this umbilical cord,” the actor told Natalie Morales of the “Today” show over the weekend during a helicopter ride that was part of his “Furious 7” promotion work. “I just thought -- I knew he was there. And it felt like, you know, a way to keep his memory a part of my family and a part of my world.”

Walker died at age 40 in a high-speed car crash in Santa Clarita on Nov. 30, 2013. He’d already reportedly finished filming his dramatic scenes for “Furious 7” and most of his action scenes, and his brothers stepped in to help the production fill in the blanks.

Diesel, in the “Today” segment that aired Monday, also confirmed last week’s rumors that his newly arrived third child is of the princess persuasion. The 47-year-old and Jimenez, 31, already were parents to a daughter and a son, Hania Riley, 6, and Vincent Sinclair, 4.

He announced the birth -- though not the specific birth date, gender or any details about length or weight -- in a Facebook post last Monday, quoting lyrics from “What a Wonderful World.”

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