Ava

Ava Gardner in a black satin gown, leaning against a piano with a cigarette and a martini, is the picture most people summon when they hear the name — and the modern revival arguably starts there, in the noir-soaked 1940s when Gardner went from a North Carolina sharecropper's daughter to one of the most photographed women alive. The etymology is murkier than the glamour suggests. Ava may descend from a Germanic root aval, meaning desired, or from the Latin avis, meaning bird, or from the medieval Frankish nickname for Hadwig — a ninth-century Frankish noblewoman who became a Catholic saint.

The name lay almost dormant through the second half of the twentieth century and then returned hard in the 2000s, when Reese Witherspoon used it for her daughter in 1999 and a generation of celebrity parents followed. Ava entered the SSA top 10 in 2005 and has stayed there ever since, currently at number nine — the most successful three-letter girls' name of the twenty-first century, narrowly ahead of Mia.

Famous Avas include Ava Gardner, Ava DuVernay (the Selma director), Ava Phillippe (Witherspoon's daughter, who effectively launched the modern wave), and Ava Max (the Albanian-American pop singer). Two syllables — A-va — both open, both bright, the v doing all the work between them. The name pairs beautifully with longer Edwardian middles (Ava Charlotte, Ava Rose, Ava Wren, Ava June) and reads as both vintage and contemporary, both glamorous and unfussy. Compact, vowel-rich, faintly cinematic. The kind of name that sounds equally good shouted across a playground and whispered in the credits of a black-and-white film.