Ada

Ada was a favorite at the end of the nineteenth century that has started to come back in the past few years. Some may seek it out as an alternative to the overpopular Ava, and it's also part of the trend toward simple, old-fashioned names beginning with a vowel, like Ivy and Ella.

A worthy namesake is Ada Lovelace, mathematician daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who worked with Charles Babbage on the forerunners to the calculator and the computer. In his poem 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,' Byron addreses her as 'Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart.'

Ada has a number of fictional references as well, appearing in Dickens's Bleak House and Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada, in addition to which characters with the name were portrayed by Holly Hunter in The Piano and Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain.

Adah, pronounced AH-da, is a biblical name, one of the first female names mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

Ada returned to the Top 1000 in 2004, after being off since the 1980s; by contrast, Ada was a Top 100 name in the 1880s.