Elaine

Tennyson named her the lily maid of Astolat, the girl who loved Lancelot so completely that she died of it and floated down the river to Camelot in a funeral barge with a letter in her hand. That Elaine is the most famous version, but there were others in the Arthurian tradition — daughters, enchantresses, queens — because Elaine was simply what you called a woman at the round table. The name is the Old French form of Helen, rooted in the Greek word for light.

Seinfeld gave a New York version to American television in the 1990s and managed the feat of making the name simultaneously comic and entirely sympathetic. After decades of relative quiet, Elaine has been edging back toward American favor, driven partly by the vintage revival and partly by parents who find in its two clean syllables a name that is literary without being precious. It sits at rank 369, moving upward.

Two syllables in quiet succession: eh-LAYN, the diphthong in the second beat giving it a slight lift. It pairs naturally with the similarly poised Elodie or the soft Laila from the sibling cluster, and the nickname Ellie applies to it as naturally as to Eleanor or Eliza. The woman named Elaine tends to be the one who has read the poem — the actual Tennyson poem, not just the Wikipedia summary — and who has a considered opinion about whether the lily maid was tragic or transcendent.