Sophia

If you're going to hand a child a headline quality to live up to, you could do a great deal worse than the one tucked inside Sophia. This is a name that means, quite simply and quite grandly, wisdom.

It's Greek, and it's old, and you can somehow hear both of those things when you say it, that soft opening, the graceful fall of the final syllable. Yet for all its antiquity, Sophia has never had a dowdy decade. It's one of those rare classics that skips lightly from century to century, always elegant, never fusty, forever just a little bit ahead of the room.

The charts have certainly noticed. Sophia sits at number 4 in the United States and 5 in Canada, holds 11 in Australia, 13 in England and Wales and 16 in Brazil, and carries on to 22 in New Zealand, 51 in Mexico City and 112 in France. That's the sort of steady, worldwide devotion most names would trade their vowels for.

It's also generous with nicknames, which is half its practical genius. Sophia softens into the friendly, ever-cheerful Sophie or the warmer Sonia, so the full name can stay in reserve for the important stuff while everyday life gets the shorter, sunnier version.

And its bearers make a genuinely stirring roll call. There is Sophie Scholl, the young German resistance figure, whose courage lends the name a real and quiet steel. There is the actress Sophia Bush, keeping it bright and current. And there is history's own Sophia of Hanover, the Electress whose line, under the Act of Settlement, threads straight into the British monarchy, along with Sophia of Nassau, a Swedish queen. Wisdom, evidently, keeps very distinguished company.

On a shortlist, Sophia is a wonderfully easy match. Set it beside Isabella and Olivia for a lush, romantic trio, or let it balance the sturdier Alexander and Liam, and everything simply clicks into place. It's soft without being fragile, classic without being stuffy, and it has never once needed a trend to prop it up.

So do you write it down in confident ink? Ah, that's the sweet, circular torment of the whole affair, the one bit of wisdom no name can quite supply. Sophia can mean the very quality you'd most wish for a daughter, chart across the globe, shorten two lovely ways and pair with anything on your list, and you'll still lie there turning it over, testing whether it truly belongs to the small stranger on the way. It argues its case beautifully. But the deciding vote, as ever, waits on someone yet to arrive.