Favorite Names

Leo is a strong-yet-friendly name that was common among the Romans, used for thirteen popes, and is now at its highest point ever in the US thanks in part to Leonardo "Leo" DiCaprio.

Margot is suddenly a star again. After a nearly-half century absence, it hopped back on the Top 1000 list in 2013 and is on the rise. The Margot spelling is now given to three times as many baby girls as the Margo one.

Oliver is an international star, ranking near the top of the charts in the US and throughout the English-speaking world, along with a host of European and Latin American countries, from Norway to Chile, Slovenia to Switzerland.

Posie and its near-identical twins Posy and Posey are delicate old-fashioned flower names of the type that are stylish today: Think Poppy, Marigold, Clover.

Rosalie hit its apex in 1938 and then slid straight downhill until it fell off the U.S. Top 1000 completely in the 1980s, only to spring back to life in 2009 as the name of a character in the Twilight series. The beautiful vampire Rosalie Hale has breathed fresh life back into this mid-century name, and the fact that the character is both sympathetic and relatively minor means Rosalie has the chance to thrive again as a baby name without feeling unduly tied to Twilight.

Diminutive of the Italian Giovanna, or sometimes Vanessa or Ivanna.