Indigo

Indigo is a color that occupied its own band of the spectrum between blue and violet — Isaac Newton insisted on it — and a dye that stained the hands of weavers from the Indus River to antebellum South Carolina. The word is Greek in shape and Indian in origin, from indikon, the dye from India, and as a name it carries that long layered history without announcing it.

Three syllables that open wide and settle soft. It's been the choice of rock musicians and novelists naming their children with an eye toward the unusual; now it's arrived at 923, which means it is no longer unusual but is still unmistakably itself. Unisex by sensibility, sensory by design — you can almost feel the blue-violet dye in the syllables. Indigo wears well with surnames that are short and Anglo, letting the three syllables breathe.