Olivia

Here is a name that has done the near-impossible: it has become wildly, chart-toppingly popular while still managing to feel gentle. Olivia is everywhere, and it has stayed lovely anyway.

And by everywhere, I do mean everywhere. Olivia is number one in the United States, number one in England and Wales and number one in Canada, a genuine clean sweep. It carries on at 3 in Argentina, 4 in Australia, 6 in New Zealand, 7 in Catalonia and 26 in France. If you want a name the whole world already agrees on, you can stop looking; this is the one everybody quietly settled on at once.

What's rather charming is how humble its meaning is for a name that rules half the planet. Olivia comes from Latin and simply means olive. Not a queen, not a jewel, not a conquering heroine, a small, green, sun-warmed fruit, and the branch that has stood for peace since anyone can remember. There's something disarming about that. A globe-topping name that, at heart, is just a bit of gentle Mediterranean calm on a branch.

It's beautifully practical, too. Olivia folds down to the breezy Liv or the sweeter Via, so your child gets the full, elegant version for grand occasions and a snappy, modern nickname for everything else. Long name, short name, both charming, no compromise required.

The name also has a certain screen-lit glamour to it. Think of Olivia de Havilland, the British actress whose career spanned Hollywood's golden decades with real poise. Fiction leans on it as well, from the sharp, unflappable Olivia Dunham of Fringe. It's a name that seems equally at ease in a period drama and a modern thriller, poised, but never stiff.

On a shortlist, Olivia is the easiest of neighbours. Set it beside Lucas, Mateo, Sofia and Gabriel and everything falls into a soft, warm, faintly sunlit harmony. It goes with almost anything, which is precisely why it turns up alongside almost everything. The only real risk is the very thing that makes it so appealing: your Olivia may well share a cloakroom peg with one or two others, and answer to her own name across a busy playground now and then. For many parents that is a price well worth paying for something this reliably lovely.

And that's the exquisite catch, isn't it. A name can sit at the summit of the charts, mean something as peaceable as an olive branch, shorten two delightful ways and glide onto any shortlist, and you'll still hesitate, wondering whether the world's favourite is also, precisely, yours. Olivia makes a radiant case for itself. But the final word, as always, belongs to a small person who hasn't arrived to give it yet.