Cora

The name stems from the Greek kore, meaning maiden, an epithet associated with Persephone. James Fenimore Cooper essentially minted the modern English form for his 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. American parents took to the printed page, making the name a regular fixture in nineteenth-century birth records before letting it sit largely idle for eight decades.

The name carries the antique scent of parlor lamps and high-button boots. In practice, more than half of all living Coras are currently in elementary school or car seats, products of a naming wave that crested in 2019. It sounds like an heirloom great-aunt, but it spends most of its weekday mornings negotiating over apple slices. It reached rank seventy-one right before the turn of the decade without requiring anyone to explain the spelling.