Kai

A single syllable that arrives like a wave breaking clean on sand. Kai carries Hawaiian resonance as the word for sea, Japanese weight as shell or recovery, and Scandinavian roots reaching back to ancient seafaring lineages. That polyglot quality is exactly what has propelled it: one of the fastest-climbing unisex names of the last two decades, now hovering near the top 75 in the United States and used for roughly one in every 400 babies. It feels global without feeling borrowed, short without feeling slight. Kai reads as athletic on a boy, poetic on a girl, and entirely of this century on anyone.