Anita

Anita began as the Spanish diminutive of Ana, the Hebrew Hannah meaning "grace," and spread through Poland, Italy, and the English-speaking world during the twentieth century as its own independent name. Anita Ekberg wading through the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita and Anita in West Side Story pressed it into mid-century American popular memory. Three syllables with a lift on the middle ee, it moves lightly, warm at the edges. The name peaked in the US in the 1940s and 50s and has since become uncommon, the kind of name that reads both retro and continental. Understated, graceful, musical.