Scout

From the Old French escouter — to listen — the word belonged first to sentries and trail-blazers, to the person stationed at the edge of camp to hear what was coming. Then Harper Lee gave it to Jean Louise Finch, the barefoot narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, and the name became something richer: a child who sees more clearly than anyone around her, who trusts her own ears before the adults' explanations.

Bruce Willis and Demi Moore put it on a daughter in 1986 and gave it a public boost; now at 927, Scout reads as genuinely shared — boy or girl or neither — with a clean outdoor energy that suits almost any surname. It is brisk, observant, and slightly literary without being pretentious. The single syllable lands hard and honest, the kind of name that does not mess around.