Laura

A crown of laurel leaves pressed onto a victor's brow, Laura descends from the Latin laurus and entered English affection through Petrarch, whose fourteenth-century sonnets immortalized a woman he glimpsed in an Avignon church. The name dominated American nurseries in the 1960s, peaking when Laura Ingalls Wilder's prairie memoirs found a new generation on television. Today it settles into the mid-300s, worn less by babies than by mothers and aunts, which gives it a gentle revival glow. Two clean syllables, no ornament needed. Laura carries itself with the quiet authority of someone who never raises her voice.