Margaret

The Greek margarites meant pearl, and the Greeks borrowed the word from somewhere east of their own maps, a name that arrived already carrying the shimmer of distant trade. From there it moved through Saint Margaret of Antioch, through queens of Scotland and Denmark and England, through Margaret Fuller and Margaret Sanger and Margaret Atwood, each one bending the name slightly in her direction before passing it forward.

Margaret held a place in the U.S. top 20 from 1880 through the 1950s, the kind of statistical bedrock that belonged to a generation of mothers and grandmothers. It dipped through the middle decades of the century, the way most formal names did, and began returning in the 2010s as parents discovered that the names their great-grandmothers had worn were suddenly the freshest things on the playground. It sits at rank 119 today, a name in the middle of its revival.

Three syllables — MAR-ga-ret — with a sturdy first beat and a slight trailing softness give it the feel of a name that has been worn a long time and hasn't worn out. Maggie, Meg, and Peggy are all waiting inside it, each one a different room in the same house. Margaret beside Eliza, Cecilia, or Juniper as a sibling keeps the literary-classical register balanced. The girl this name suits reads primary sources, argues from evidence, and still remembers to call her grandmother on Sundays.