Lyra

She lives in the northern sky, a small constellation holding the brightest star visible from the Northern Hemisphere. Lyra takes its name from the Latin for "lyre" — the instrument of Orpheus, whose music moved stones and charmed the underworld, and whose harp was set among the stars after his death. That origin gives the name an unusual double resonance: astronomical and mythological at once, scientific and ancient in the same breath.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy gave the name its modern literary charge: Lyra Belacqua, the fierce, resourceful protagonist who navigates parallel worlds with a truth-telling compass in her hand. That character has done considerable work steering the name toward American nurseries; it now sits at rank 482, climbing steadily as parents who grew up reading Pullman begin naming their own children. The constellation and the fictional girl have reinforced each other in a way that rarely happens so cleanly.

Two syllables move with a brightness that matches the star at the constellation's heart — LY-ra — the long first vowel pulling open, the final syllable settling softly. It pairs naturally beside Paris or Heaven for siblings who share its sense of the elevated and the luminous, or beside Scarlet when contrast in weight is the point. The girl who grows into Lyra tends to be the one who can read a room the way her namesake read the alethiometer — not always showing what she knows, trusting the instrument, moving toward the truth without making a speech about it.