Augustus

Rome's first emperor took the name as a title — augustus, venerable, majestic, the one to whom reverence is owed — in 27 BCE, and what had been Octavian became the template for every monarch who followed. A long line of European kings borrowed the honorific as a given name, and it eventually shed most of its imperial gravity and arrived in modern usage carrying a kind of magnificent excess that parents began finding charming rather than overbearing. John Green's Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars did the most recent significant work of humanizing it, giving the name bookish teenage gravitas and a very particular walk.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens shaped American sculpture in the late nineteenth century, his coins and memorials still visible in public spaces across the country. Currently at rank 408, Augustus is climbing with the same cohort as Solomon, Apollo, and Frederick — names that were historically considered too large for regular use and are now being reconsidered by parents who want something with real weight. The nicknames Gus and Auggie make the daily version more manageable.

Three syllables that open on a vowel and build in grandeur — Au-gus-tus — the name landing with the slow deliberateness of something carved in stone rather than written in pencil. In a sibling set with Apollo, Solomon, or Frederick, it holds the register of names that require the child to grow into them and reward the wait. The boy who carries it tends to be more comfortable with large ideas than his classmates expect, and less comfortable with small cruelties.