Luna

The Roman goddess Luna drove her silver chariot across the night sky while her brother Sol drove the day's — and the name has kept some of that ancient, lunar pull. Luna is simply the Latin word for moon, unchanged across two millennia, which is its own kind of magic. The name had been in use across Italy and Spain for centuries before American parents discovered it almost overnight in the 2010s. Chrissy Teigen and John Legend used it for their daughter in 2016; the Harry Potter novels had already made Luna Lovegood — the dreamy, radish-earringed Ravenclaw — a shorthand for dreamy outsiderhood since 2003.

The name climbed into the American top 100 in 2014 and into the top 15 within a decade, one of the fastest sustained ascents of any girls' name in the entire SSA database. Other bearers include the singer Luna Vachon, the actress Luna Wedler, and Luna the white whale of Nootka Sound, who became a Canadian folk hero in the early 2000s. Two syllables, both open, both round — LU-na — a name shaped like the thing it names.

The name pairs beautifully with celestial, witchy, or natural-world middles (Luna Rose, Luna Sage, Luna Wren, Luna Maeve) and reads beautifully in many languages — Luna is the same word in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Latin. Nicknames are rare; the name is already its own complete moon. Celestial, slightly witchy, faintly nocturnal, and utterly unfussed. A name that suggests bedtime stories, telescopes, and a child who will tell you the names of the constellations before she can spell her own.