Skyler

Skyler comes with a view. A phonetic adaptation of the Dutch surname Schuyler, meaning "scholar," it arrived in New York with seventeenth-century settlers, borne most famously by Alexander Hamilton's in-laws. By the late twentieth century Americans had respelled it to foreground the word sky, giving it an airy, open-sky feel nothing to do with its original meaning. Breaking Bad's Skyler White gave it a certain twenty-first-century grit. Ranked 661 and solidly unisex, the name balances academic lineage with big-sky ease. Two syllables that feel like a deep breath taken on a porch in late summer, the horizon long and empty.