Esme

It has the quiet glamour of a name found in the margin of a letter. Esme comes from the Old French esmer, meaning to esteem or to love, and it arrived in Scotland from France in the sixteenth century, flourishing briefly among the Scottish nobility before retreating into rare-book territory, a name preserved by elegance rather than frequency.

J. D. Salinger found it there and put it at the center of For Esme — with Love and Squalor, one of the most precise short stories in American literature, and it has carried that literary association ever since. Period dramas and the Twilight series gave it further exposure, and it now sits at rank 344 — intimate and slightly unusual, a name that rewards the person who chooses it.

Two syllables spoken EZ-may, the accent on the first, a name with the brevity of a nickname and the bearing of a title. Thea, Sylvie, and Wrenlee share its register — names that feel chosen rather than inherited, quiet rather than showy. Picture a girl who moves through the world with a particular awareness of other people's inner lives, who remembers not what you said but what you meant, who will write letters — actual letters, in actual envelopes — and who will, at some point, make someone feel seen in a way they did not expect and will not forget.