Scarlett

The word began on medieval market days, shouted between dyers hauling bolts of brilliant red cloth across cobblestones — a scarlet was originally both the fabric (a fine, dyed wool) and the craftsman who produced it. The English surname Scarlett recorded the trade for a thousand years before American parents converted it back into a first name. The pigment stuck. The dye itself, made from kermes insects in the medieval Mediterranean and then from cochineal in colonial Mexico, was so prized and so expensive that scarlet became shorthand for both wealth and (later, in the Puritan imagination) sin.

Margaret Mitchell gave the name a heroine in 1936's Gone with the Wind — Scarlett O'Hara, the green-eyed, ruthless, morally complicated Georgia plantation daughter — and Vivien Leigh's 1939 film performance gave the name a face. Hollywood handed the role to Scarlett Johansson sixty years later (born in 1984, when the name was outside the top 1000) and parents began choosing it in earnest in the late 2000s. Scarlett entered the SSA top 100 in 2010, the top 30 by 2016, and currently sits at rank twenty-seven.

Famous bearers include Scarlett Johansson, Scarlett Pomers (the Reba actress), and the children of various 2010s celebrities. Two syllables, one sharp consonant at the close — SCAR-let — and a color most names don't dare. Pairs beautifully with floral or vintage middles (Scarlett Rose, Scarlett Mae, Scarlett Wren). Nicknames are limited but useful: Scar for the modern, Lettie for the Edwardian. Old-Hollywood glamour with a seam of grit underneath — velvet with a pocket knife in it.