Rebecca

From the Hebrew Rivka, she comes down through centuries carrying a matriarch's authority — the woman who drew water from the well for a stranger's camels without being asked, who became the wife of Isaac, who understood exactly what she was doing when she sent her younger son to receive the blessing meant for the elder. Scholars translate Rivka variously as to bind or to tie, a meaning as strong as rope.

Rebecca has never fully left the American top 500 since naming records began. It reached its peak in the 1970s, softened in the popular imagination by Daphne du Maurier's gothic heroine — Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again — and has settled now at rank 342, a Biblical classic that outlasts its own fashions without effort.

Three syllables with a hard central stop: re-BEK-a, the K cracking like a knuckle, the final vowel releasing cleanly. Regina, Kalani, and Vanessa share her shelf naturally, names with their own history and their own bearing. Picture a woman who has read widely enough to have opinions she can defend, who gets things done at the committee level that other people only manage at the executive level, who has been underestimated about seven times too many, and who has never once wasted the advantage it gave her.