Penelope

For twenty years she sat at her loom, weaving by day and unraveling by night, refusing the suitors who swarmed her hall and waiting for Odysseus to come home from Troy — Homer's Penelope is patience rendered as a verb, and her name has carried that quality for nearly three thousand years. The Greek Penelopeia may come from a word for weaver (penelops, related to the warp threads of a loom) or from the bird penelops, a kind of duck — scholars have been charmed and puzzled by both etymologies for millennia, and both are doing some work in the name's modern feel.

Three syllables of unhurried music in the formal pronunciation, four in the everyday — Peh-NEL-oh-pee — with the central long e holding the word in place. After decades of being a great-aunt name (or worse, a comic-strip name, thanks to Penelope Pitstop and Penelope Pussycat), Penelope returned to the American top 100 in 2011 and rocketed up to the top 30 by 2017. The revival owes much to Penelope Cruz, the Spanish actress whose career took off internationally in the 2000s, and to a small wave of celebrity Penelopes (Kourtney Kardashian and Tina Fey both used it for daughters).

The name currently sits at rank twenty-eight. Famous bearers include Penelope Cruz, Penelope Wilton (the Downton Abbey actress), Penelope Mortimer, and the Odyssey's heroine. Pairs beautifully with both Greek-leaning and Edwardian middles (Penelope Rose, Penelope Wren, Penelope Mae). Nicknames are abundant: Penny for the warm-hearted, Nell for the Edwardian, Poppy for the British, Lola in some traditions. Literary, mythological, oddly modern — a name with its own gravity, and its own loom.