Joan

Joan is the medieval English form of Johanna, feminine of John, from the Hebrew Yochanan, God is gracious. For most of the twentieth century it was a top-ten girls' name, then slipped quietly out of fashion, then began, as these things do, to come back. The associations are formidable: Joan of Arc on her horse, Joan Didion at her typewriter, Joan Baez at the microphone, Joan Crawford on the soundstage. At 1013 and increasingly unisex, Joan is a single clean syllable with no ornament and no apology, the kind of name that writes its own memo.