Leia

George Lucas borrowed or invented the spelling in 1977 and placed it on a princess with cinnamon-bun braids, a blaster, and no patience for incompetence — and Princess Leia Organa has been sending distress messages and leading rebellions ever since. The name echoes the Hebrew Leah, meaning weary, and the Hawaiian Leia, meaning child of heaven or a wreath of flowers, two meanings that between them cover both the burden and the grace.

Carrie Fisher made the name a cultural inheritance, and its popularity reflects the scale of that inheritance: Leia sits now at rank 290, buoyed by a generation of parents who grew up watching the films and are now naming their daughters after the woman who was the most capable person in any room the story put her in. The name requires no other credential than the one it already has.

Two syllables — LAY-ah — move with a falling rhythm, open and easy, the kind of name that lands without effort. Beside Evie, Maggie, Brooke, or Jane in a sibling set it holds its warmth without competing. Leia Rose, Leia Wren, Leia June pair naturally with the name's lightness. The girl who carries this name tends to know her own mind at an age when most people are still figuring out what their mind is for — self-possessed in the way that the name's most famous bearer was, equal parts tenderness and terrifying certainty.