Judah

Judah is the Hebrew Yehudah, "praised," the fourth son of Jacob and the tribe from which a kingdom and a lion took their name. For centuries English speakers reached for Judas or Jude; Judah itself stayed largely within Jewish families until the 2000s, when Americans rediscovered its gravity and its softness in the same breath. The opening consonant is warm, the ending open and unhurried. Currently at rank 179, it rose alongside a wider fashion for biblical names with weight rather than frilled edges. Judah feels literary and lived-in, ancient without being formal, a name that already sounds like character.