Liliana

Say Liliana out loud and notice what your mouth does. Four syllables, all soft, not a sharp edge anywhere. It is less a name than a small piece of music.

The meaning is beautifully literal. It is Latin, and it means the lily flower. That is the whole story. No riddle, no buried metaphor about hilltops or warriors. Just a flower that has spent a couple of thousand years being shorthand for anything graceful, and a name that borrowed its entire personality wholesale.

What is interesting is where it lands. Liliana sits at 110 in the United States as of 2020 and 123 in Australia in 2025, which is properly popular without being inescapable. Then it thins out gently: 244 in England and Wales, 257 in Mexico City, 278 in Canada, 331 in New Zealand, 401 in Argentina, 477 in Catalonia. That is the profile of a name everybody recognises and hardly anybody uses, which is arguably the sweet spot. Your Liliana will not be one of four in her class, but nobody will ask you to spell it twice either.

The nickname question

Here is the thing worth thinking about before you commit. Liliana arrives with a ready-made set of shorter selves: Lily, Lia and Lana. Those are not variations on a theme so much as three separate people. Lily is daisy chains and jam on the face. Lia is quiet and faintly unknowable. Lana sounds like she runs a record label.

You do not get to pick which one sticks. Playgrounds decide that, usually within a fortnight, and they never consult the parents. The consolation is that the full name is always sitting underneath, waiting for the graduation certificate.

On a shortlist it keeps company with Juliana, Valentina, Gabriel and Adrian. Long, unhurried, faintly Mediterranean names that sound like they belong to a family who eat dinner late.

Women who have worn it

There is real weight behind the name. Liliana Segre is an Italian Holocaust survivor and senator for life. Liliana Cavani is an Italian film director and screenwriter. Liliana Gafencu is a Romanian rower, and Liliana Mumy is an American actress. Testimony, cinema, sport, screen. For a name that means a flower, it has done a remarkable amount of heavy lifting.

Practically, it travels well. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and English speakers all read it correctly on the first attempt, which is not something you can say about most four-syllable names. If your family spans more than one language, that counts for a great deal.

The only genuine drawback is length. Four syllables against a long surname can turn a name into a sentence, so say the whole thing aloud, ideally in the voice you will use when calling someone in from the garden at dusk.

And then you will dither for another six weeks anyway, because naming a person is the loveliest homework you will ever be set, and there is no mark scheme.