Amber

The word traces through Old French and Medieval Latin back to the Arabic ‘anbar, which originally referred to ambergris before settling onto fossilized tree resin. Kathleen Winsor brought the name into midcentury living rooms with her scandalous 1944 novel Forever Amber, though American parents waited another four decades to embrace it en masse. First appearing in American birth tallies in 1880 as a rare novelty, it sat quietly until the late-twentieth-century appetite for gemstone names took hold.

The name immediately places its bearer in the passenger seat of a mid-eighties hatchback with a working cassette deck. An Amber tends to be pictured alongside clear landline phones, oversized windbreakers, and the height of the suburban mall boom. With an estimated average age of thirty-seven today, the name belongs largely to millennials who remember when internet access arrived on compact discs. Statistically, nobody expects an Amber to be seventy, and very few expect her to be seven.