Zane

Zane came into the American imagination through Zane Grey, the dentist-turned-novelist whose Riders of the Purple Sage and dozens of other Westerns stamped the name onto the frontier. Grey inherited it from an ancestor, Ebenezer Zane, who founded Zanesville, Ohio; the root may be a variant of John, from the Hebrew for "God is gracious." The name entered the American Top 1000 in the 1970s alongside the Western revival and has climbed quietly to near 306. One sharp syllable that closes with a long A, ZAYN. Lean, cinematic, faintly dusty in the good way—Zane sounds like a boy with a horizon line.