Harper

Harper was once a job — the person who played the harp at a medieval feast, whose surname recorded the work — and the name still carries a faint hum of string and hall. The English surname appears in Domesday-era records and persisted as a workmanlike, plainspoken Anglo-Saxon family name for a thousand years before American parents began converting it back into a first name in the late twentieth century. Harper Lee, publishing To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, pulled it firmly into literary air; Harper's Bazaar made it fashion-coded; David Beckham's daughter Harper Seven, born in 2011, pulled it firmly into tabloid air.

Between them, they turned an old English occupational into one of the defining girls' names of the 2010s. Harper entered the SSA top 100 in 2010 and rocketed into the top 10 by 2015 — one of the fastest climbs of any twenty-first-century girls' name. It has held a top-twenty spot for years and shows no sign of fading. Famous bearers (besides Lee and Beckham) include the actress Harper Avery character on Grey's Anatomy, the Beckham daughter, and the wave of small Harpers born to American parents through the 2010s.

Two crisp syllables with a hard r that keeps the name from going soft — HAR-per. Pairs cleanly with Edwardian middles (Harper Rose, Harper Wren, Harper June) and reads beautifully across genders, though the SSA chart has cemented it as predominantly feminine in the U.S. (in Britain, it skews unisex). Folk, bookish, lightly androgynous, with the structural reliability of a surname that has done its job for centuries.