London

Pre-Roman, possibly Celtic, possibly rooted in a word meaning a river too wide to ford — London's etymology is ancient and genuinely contested among scholars, which suits a capital city that has spent two thousand years containing multitudes. The place arrived as a given name in the early 2000s, one of the first great city-names to make the full crossing from surname to nursery, and it did so for both boys and girls simultaneously — a genuine unisex success in an era when those were still relatively rare and usually unplanned.

American parents reaching for London were reaching for cosmopolitanism without pretension, for the idea of a city that has always been several cities at once. The name climbed for girls first and then extended to boys, following the same generational pattern as Taylor and Riley. It currently sits at rank 355, holding its position steadily rather than ascending or retreating. Jack London gave the name its literary frontier spirit a full century before it became a nursery trend.

Two solid syllables — LUN-dun — a grounded, unhurried sound with a soft final consonant that doesn't demand anything from you. Alongside siblings named Taylor or Baylor it would feel right in any decade from 1995 to the present; a Rylan or Sterling beside it would round out the unisex contemporary set with good variety. The child who carries London well tends to be comfortable with ambiguity — good at navigating new places, good at making the unfamiliar feel manageable, good at the long view.