Alice

Here is a fact to open with, because it surprises almost everyone: Alice is the third most popular girls' name in Brazil. Not a curiosity, not a footnote. Third, as of 2022.

That tends to reorder how people think about it. In Britain, Alice reads as a gentle heirloom, the kind of name written in fountain pen on the flyleaf of a book. Elsewhere it is a genuine chart-topper. France had it at number nine in 2024, Canada at 12, and it charts in Australia at 60, New Zealand at 62 and the United States at 76. England and Wales, where you might expect it to dominate, keeps it at a modest 49. The classic is quietly more popular abroad than at home.

The name itself arrived in English as a French form of an older Germanic name, and it carries a rather grand meaning: of noble birth. There is something pleasing about that, because nothing about Alice sounds pompous. It is two soft syllables that end in a hiss, easy to say and impossible to mangle. It manages to be aristocratic and completely unshowy at the same time, which is a trick most names never learn.

It has attracted serious writers, too. Alice Munro, the Canadian writer, lived from 1931 to 2024. Alice Walker, the American author and activist, was born in 1944. And then there is the most famous Alice of all, the girl from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who has been falling down that hole for generations and has left the name permanently tinted with curiosity, pinafores and slightly alarming tea.

Whether that last association is a feature or a problem is a personal call. Some parents love the whiff of storybook. Others would rather their daughter not spend her childhood being asked about rabbits. In practice, nobody ever seems to mind.

On the practical front it behaves impeccably. Five letters, one spelling that everybody guesses correctly, and a short form in Ali if the full version ever feels too formal for a muddy four-year-old. It also ages beautifully, which is the real test. Alice works on a nursery peg, a university offer letter and a nameplate on a door, without ever needing to be reintroduced.

If you are drawn to it, you probably have a certain kind of shortlist already. Alice sits naturally alongside names like these:

• Arthur
• Charlotte
• Henry
• Clara

All slightly old-fashioned, all comfortably back in circulation, none of them trying to be clever.

So Alice offers you nobility without the fuss, a global passport, and roughly a century of literary company. The only thing it cannot do is make the decision for you. That part remains gloriously, maddeningly yours: weeks of lists, a shortlist of four, and the creeping certainty that you will change your mind again the moment you meet the person you are naming.