Wilder

Wind through tall grass, a screen door slamming — the name sounds like what it means. Wilder comes from an English and German surname meaning untamed or of the wild, and it moved into first-name territory on the back of a generation of parents drawn to frontier vocabulary and the appeal of a name that felt open rather than settled. It has the good fortune of sounding like a direction rather than a destination.

Goldie Hawn, Oliver Hudson, and Keri Russell each named a child Wilder, small celebrity endorsements that helped tip it from eccentric surname into an approachable first name. It currently sits at rank 392 in the United States, rising steadily through the 2010s and into the 2020s on the same wave that lifted Ranger and Wilder's neighbor, Sawyer. The name has settled into the mainstream without losing its outdoor-light quality.

Two syllables, the second one trailing open like a field — Wild-er, a name that doesn't come to a hard stop. It pairs easily alongside Marshall, Jared, Khalil, and Jaden as brothers, names that share a certain confident informality. The boy named Wilder tends to be the one who wants to know what's over the next hill — not restless exactly, just genuinely interested in what comes next, which turns out to be a useful quality in almost any situation.