Lucas

Light does a lot of the heavy lifting in Lucas. Straight from Latin, the name means bringer of light, and whether that light is a candle in the dark or simply a small face that brightens the instant you walk into the room, it's a hopeful thing to fasten to a person.

Parents everywhere seem to agree. Lucas has settled into the top ten and its outskirts across a remarkable spread of countries: seventh in Canada, eighth in the United States, eleventh in Brazil, thirteenth in New Zealand and sixteenth in Australia. Cross into Europe and it holds firm, seventeenth in Catalonia, eighteenth in France, twenty-fifth in England & Wales. It's the kind of name a family could carry from one continent to another without anyone so much as blinking.

Its great trick is that it feels timeless without feeling old. Lucas has the weight of something ancient and the polish of something thoroughly modern, which is a difficult balance to strike. Tucked onto a shortlist beside Emma, Oliver, Sophia and Ethan, it neither shouts nor shrinks, it just fits. And if you fancy something shorter, Luke is right there waiting, crisp and ready-made. It's a name that answers to almost any accent, too, the same four letters glide from a French classroom to an Australian beach without a moment's fuss.

The name has kept some genuinely luminous company down the centuries, too. There's Luke the Evangelist, remembered as one of the four evangelists, which gives the name its long spiritual shadow. There's Lucas Cranach the Elder, the German painter and printmaker. And for a more contemporary flavour, there's Lucas Vázquez, the Spanish footballer, and even Lucas the Spider, the cheerful animated character. Saints, painters, footballers and cartoons, that's an impressively wide net for four letters and an s.

What you get, in the end, is a name that's dependable in the best sense. It won't date, it won't confuse a teacher on the first day of term, and it will look every bit as sensible on a job application as it does on a nursery peg. For a lot of parents, that quiet reliability is worth more than any amount of novelty; there's real comfort in a name you never have to second-guess.

Of course, knowing all this doesn't make the decision land any faster. That's the beautifully frustrating truth of naming a baby, you can gather every fact, weigh every ranking, and still find yourself dithering with the pen hovering over the page and the biro slowly running dry. Bringer of light or not, Lucas will have to make its own case, like every hopeful name before it.