Jared

He appears in Genesis as a patriarch so old the text almost forgets to note his death — Yared in Hebrew, meaning descent, the grandfather of Enoch and a figure whose lifespan made him a kind of legend before legends had a proper genre. The Puritans collected exactly this kind of deep-cut biblical name, planting it in American soil in the seventeenth century, and Jared slept there quietly until the 1960s when the Western series The Big Valley woke it up and put it on a brooding Barkley brother.

It peaked in the 1990s as a quintessential sound of that decade — syllable-efficient, vaguely biblical, easy to spell — and Jared Leto has kept the name in circulation through a career that has rarely allowed for a quiet year. In the United States it currently sits at rank 393, the back end of the curve from its peak, the name of older brothers and young fathers now, which gives it its own quiet continuity.

Two syllables with a soft r in the middle that keeps it from sounding blunt — Jar-ed, a name that opens and closes without drama. It pairs naturally alongside Wilder, Jaden, Marshall, and Kashton as brothers. The boy named Jared tends to be someone who takes longer than average to decide on things and then sticks with the decision — not stubborn, just thorough in a way that usually turns out to be correct.