Elena

Some names quietly carry their own glow, and Elena is very much one of them. It comes from Greek, and it means "shining light", which is a rather lovely thing to hand a small child, even one whose current talents are limited to gurgling and taking outrageously loud naps at the most inconvenient possible times.

It is an elegant name that never once turns stuffy, in large part because it shortens so very sweetly. There is the bright, friendly Elly and the softer, more romantic Lena, which between them give your daughter a name that can be as breezy or as poised as she happens to feel on any given day. Three syllables of quiet class, with a casual option conveniently built straight in.

It is especially beloved right across Europe and a good way beyond. Elena is number 20 in France and keeps good company elsewhere: number 48 in Canada, number 55 in the United States, number 62 in Mexico City, number 64 in Argentina, number 71 in Catalonia, number 77 in Brazil and number 85 in Australia. It is that rare name that feels genuinely at home in a great many accents without ever quite losing its own shape.

It has a fittingly luminous cast, too. The Greek singer Helena Paparizou carries a close cousin of it in her homeland, and fiction has been fond of it for years, Elena Gilbert anchored the drama in The Vampire Diaries for a whole generation of viewers. Whether on the stage or on the screen, the name seems naturally drawn to precisely the spotlight its meaning quietly promises.

For a sibling set it blends in effortlessly with the polished classics. Set it beside Lucas, Chloe, Gabriel or Sarah and you have a group that sounds graceful, settled and without a single hint of fuss about it.

Part of the quiet appeal is how gracefully it crosses borders, too. Elena reads as familiar in French, Greek, Spanish and English alike, shifting its accent to suit the room without ever needing to be spelled out twice. For a family with roots in more than one place, or simply a fondness for names that travel, that easy portability is a genuine gift, the name arrives already knowing how to belong.

The only difficulty is the one that every genuinely good name creates: it lights up your shortlist so brightly that everything after it has to work twice as hard just to get noticed. That is the beautiful nuisance of choosing, you keep hoping for one clear winner, and instead you steadily collect a dozen names you cannot bear to strike off. One of them, eventually, will be hers.