William

William the Conqueror rode out of Normandy in 1066 and imposed this name on England the way he imposed his army — and the name has been a fixture of English-speaking royalty, presidency, and culture for the nine and a half centuries since. Four English kings wore it before the Tudors, and four more after; Prince William, the current heir to the British throne, is the most recent. William comes from the Old Germanic Wilhelm, a compound of willa (will, desire) and helm (helmet, protection), giving the original meaning of resolute protector or strong-willed warrior — though over a thousand years the warrior connotation has softened into something more like steady, dependable, dignified.

American Williams have included four U.S. presidents (William Henry Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and William Jefferson Clinton — Bill, to most), the playwrights William Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams (the latter using the name as his stage handle), the journalist William F. Buckley, the novelist William Faulkner, and the poet William Carlos Williams. The name has never been out of the SSA top 20 since the chart began — like James, a quiet structural constant of American naming, currently sitting at number ten.

Three syllables, two of them light, the central -li- moving the word forward like a hinge. The nicknames are extraordinary in number: Will, Willy, Bill, Billy, Wills, Liam (the Irish form, which now beats it on the chart), and even Wim in the Dutch tradition. Pairs cleanly with everything from the very classical (William Edward, William Henry) to the modern minimalist (William Wren, William Cruz). Distinguished, mid-Atlantic, perpetually fresh, with the structural inevitability of a name that has been holding up the language since before there was English to hold up.