Felix

Most names offer you strength, or nobility, or some flower. Felix offers something considerably more practical: lucky. Lucky, and successful with it. As opening gifts go, that is hard to beat.

It is Latin, and it is one of the few names whose meaning you can explain to a five-year-old in one go. There is no unpacking required, no etymological detour through three languages. Felix means lucky. Try telling a small boy that and watch him decide to believe it.

The sound helps enormously. That X on the end does a lot of work. It gives the name a snap and a fizz that softer names simply do not have, and it means Felix never sounds sleepy, however early in the morning you are saying it. Two syllables, a click at the finish, done.

Parents across the English-speaking world have been steadily converted. Felix ranks 29 in Canada as of 2024 and 34 in New Zealand, then 59 in Australia in 2025 and 62 in England and Wales. Further out it stays pleasantly uncommon: 118 in France, 150 in Argentina, 156 in Catalonia and 223 in Mexico City. It is rising without stampeding, which is exactly the position a name should be in when you find it.

The trouble with promising luck

There is one objection worth airing, and it is usually raised by a relative over tea. Is it not a bit much, naming a child lucky? What if he trips over the cat and breaks his arm on the second day? To which the answer is that no name has ever been a forecast. Names are hopes said out loud, and hoping your child gets a fair share of good fortune is about the least controversial wish a parent has ever had.

The name has serious credentials behind it, too. Felix Mendelssohn, the German composer, pianist, organist and conductor, lived from 1809 to 1847, and there is something fitting about a name this musical belonging to someone who wrote so much of it. Fiction has taken to it as well: Felix Leiter has been a fixture of spy stories for decades, and Felix Faust covers the comic book end of things, since apparently no name is complete without at least one villain on the roster.

On a shortlist, Felix keeps continental company. Hugo, Léo, Chloé and Alice are the names it tends to appear beside, and that tells you the register precisely: short, crisp, European, slightly bookish without being stuffy. None of them need explaining anywhere in Europe, and none of them sound like they are trying too hard.

It also resists nicknames almost entirely, which is either a loss or a blessing depending on your view. What you write down is what he will be called, for good.

So Felix gives you optimism in six letters, a name that ages from cot to career without a wobble, and one mildly tedious joke to endure. The rest of it, the deciding, the second-guessing, the list that somehow keeps growing, is entirely up to you.