Archie

It swings open like a pub door in a seaside town, warm and salt-aired. Archie began as the workaday short form of Archibald — a Germanic compound meaning genuinely bold — and spent most of the twentieth century as the cheerful face on comic-book covers and British school registers, never quite landing on American charts with enough weight to matter.

Two things changed that. The Riverdale television series dressed Archie Andrews in a leather jacket and reconsidered his whole deal, and then in 2019 Prince Harry and Meghan named their son Archie Harrison, a royal endorsement that felt deliberately un-royal. The combination sent the name climbing on both sides of the Atlantic. It now sits at rank 333 in the United States, still ascending, wearing its vintage tag lightly.

Two syllables with a hard opening and a soft landing — AR-chee — a name that sounds like a handshake. It sits comfortably beside Briggs, Wade, or Dante in a sibling set that spans the old-fashioned and the cool without apology. Think of a boy who befriends the shy kid on the first day of school, who can fix a bicycle and quote a film in the same sentence, who will remember your birthday without being reminded and never make a thing of it.