Miley

Miley began as a nickname, the kind a father gives a smiley toddler and the world later adopts. Billy Ray Cyrus called his daughter Destiny Hope by it, and by the mid-2000s Hannah Montana had pulled the name into the mainstream overnight. Before then it barely registered on U.S. charts; now it holds rank 387. The sound softens Smiley into something more floral, an easy two-syllable lilt with a long bright vowel at the end. Pop culture through and through, it carries a whiff of denim and stage lights, yet it has settled into ordinary life with surprising grace.