Hannibal

Hannibal is Punic at heart, not Latin — Hanniba'al, grace of Baal — the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with elephants and troubled Rome for fifteen years before losing to Scipio at Zama. The Romans rendered the name in Latin and by slow currents it reached medieval Italy and eventually English-speaking parish registers, always as a classical flourish. Three syllables, HAN-ih-bal. Thomas Harris's fictional psychiatrist complicated it considerably in the 1980s, but the historical figure still holds the deeper grip on the imagination. The name reads bold, strategic, faintly foreign — a boy's name for a child his teachers will describe as underestimated.