Ira

Ira has lived a few different lives. In Hebrew it means watchful, and it appears in the Books of Samuel and Chronicles as an officer of David. In Sanskrit, Ira is a goddess of speech and earth. In twentieth-century America it belonged to a specific kind of Jewish intellectual cool — the lyricist Ira Gershwin setting words to his brother's melodies, the novelist Ira Levin constructing his precise, alarming plots.

Today, at 975 and increasingly unisex, Ira has the quiet confidence of a name that has outlasted trends by not caring about them. Two syllables, front-vowel bright, spare enough that it sounds good next to almost anything. It reads like a manuscript credit or a radio host's on-air name — someone who listens carefully before speaking. The name knows exactly how much to say, which turns out to be just enough.