Sidney

Sidney began as an English surname from Saint-Denis in Normandy, a toponymic that crossed the Channel with the conquerors and ended up shortened on the other side. Sir Philip Sidney wrote sonnets in the sixteenth century; Sidney Poitier rewrote Hollywood in the twentieth. In Australia it's the country's biggest city with a different spelling; in American use it's a given name that flirted with girls' territory in the nineties and has stayed unisex since, now at 1374. Two syllables, a crisp d, a soft ee. Sidney reads literary, tailored, a name with both a pen and a point of view.