Sol

One syllable, three letters, and a whole star packed inside. Sol is the Latin and Spanish word for the sun itself, virtually unchanged from Ovid to the present day, which gives it a kind of geological confidence. It's also a Jewish given name, a short form of Solomon, worn across the twentieth century by musicians and uncles and the kind of men who give very good advice.

In Spain and Argentina, Sol has long been girls' territory; in American English it reads progressively warmer and more unisex, now at 819. The sound is blunt and bright, a coin dropped on a table. There's an entire cosmology compressed into that single open vowel, and yet it still fits on a luggage tag, still works as a nickname, still does not require explanation in any language that has ever looked up at the sky. Brief, radiant, unembarrassed.