Fiona

James Macpherson invented her almost entirely, in 1762, building on the Gaelic fionn — fair, white, luminous — for a character in his Ossian cycle, poems he presented as ancient and which turned out to be substantially his own. The name sounds so authentically Celtic, so rooted in Scottish mist and mountain, that most people assume it is centuries older than it is. Macpherson's forgery was eventually exposed; his ear for how old things sound was vindicated completely.

Fiona Apple gave the name a midnight rawness in the late 1990s, her first album arriving when she was seventeen and redefining what a piano and a voice could carry. Princess Fiona in Shrek added green-tinted fairy-tale complexity the following year. Currently at rank 406 in the United States, Fiona has held a remarkably steady position for years, neither surging nor fading, buoyed by the consistent appetite for names that feel literary without requiring explanation.

Two syllables — Fee-o-na in some mouths, Fyo-na in others — the name elongating or contracting depending on the speaker's origin, which gives it a pleasant flexibility. In a sibling set with Anaya, Jayla, Michelle, or Colette, Fiona is the one that reads as slightly more literary, slightly more particular. The woman who grew up as Fiona tends to have the same quality as the name itself: entirely convincing, impossible to date, more invented than it appears and more real than its origins suggest.