Hannah

In the first book of Samuel, a woman weeps so silently at the temple that the priest assumes she is drunk; her prayer becomes a prophet, and her name, Channah, becomes a byword for grace. Hannah reads the same forward and backward, a small palindrome that has outlasted dynasties. It surged in America through the 1990s on the strength of its softness and its scripture, topping the charts in 1998. Today it sits at 52, given to roughly one in 398 girls. Jane Austen's sister-in-law wore it; so did the Arendt who gave the twentieth century its vocabulary for evil.