Leo

Short, sunny and impossible to mishear across a crowded park, Leo is a lot of name packed into three little letters. The French form of an old favourite, it means simply lion, which is a rather magnificent thing to hand a person who currently weighs about as much as a bag of sugar. Give them a few years; the roar tends to arrive.

Europe, in particular, has fallen hard for it. Leo sits third in France, fourth in Catalonia and fifth in both England & Wales and Australia, and it's every bit as beloved further afield, third in New Zealand, fourth in Canada. It softens to a gentler thirty-sixth in the United States and a hundred and ninth in Mexico City, so depending on where you're standing it's either a chart-topper or a well-kept secret. Either way, it travels with the easy confidence its meaning suggests.

Much of the charm is in the simplicity. There's no nickname to negotiate, Leo is already the affectionate short form of itself. It sits happily among the current crop of breezy, vowel-rich names, too: line it up beside Lucas, Chloé, Mila and Hugo and it fits like it was always meant to be there.

A name with a papal streak

For something so compact, Leo carries a surprising amount of history, a decidedly grand streak of it, in fact. The name has been worn by a whole succession of popes, from Leo I in the fifth century right through to Leo XIII in the nineteenth, with Leo X and Leo XII among the many in between. Whatever else you can say about Leo, it has spent an awful lot of time in very high office. For a lighter touch, television offers Leo Wyatt, evidence the name suits mere mortals just as well as pontiffs.

That's the quiet cleverness of it. Leo manages to be playful and dignified at once, casual enough for a toddler in wellies yet solid enough to have crowned centuries of history. It's the sort of name that never needs explaining and never feels like it's trying too hard.

So there it is: brief, bright, leonine and thoroughly well-travelled. And still no help at all when it comes to actually deciding, because that's the maddening joy of naming a baby, a name can be this good on paper and you'll still circle it, cross it out, and circle it again at midnight. Lion-hearted or not, Leo has to fight for its place like every other name on the list.