Lorelei

Heinrich Heine put her on the Rhine in 1824 — a golden-haired figure seated on a steep slate bluff where the river narrows and the current drags — and the name has belonged to her ever since, even as it slipped from the cliff and became a name that girls are given in landlocked places far from Germany. The root is prosaic: murmuring rock, from the place name, the physical geography beneath the legend. But the name carries only the siren, not the stone.

Lorelei Gilmore brought it into American living rooms in the early 2000s, that fast-talking, coffee-dependent single mother who made the name feel warm and slightly frenetic instead of dangerous. At rank 456, Lorelei is back in a sustained way, no longer only for parents who loved the TV show, now chosen for its sound and its literary gravity, three vowel-bright syllables moving like cursive.

Three syllables, each one distinct — LOR-uh-lie — the last one lifting. It pairs with the longer, more lyrical names in its register: Lorelei Daleyza, Lorelei Annalise, Lorelei Elowyn. The girl who carries it tends to read more than she's assigned, knows what she wants from a room before she enters it, and has a laugh that turns heads without her trying.