Iris

Originates from the Greek word for rainbow, borrowed through Greek mythology as the goddess who delivered messages across the sky. English speakers adopted it as a given name during the late Victorian botanical naming trend of the late nineteenth century. It entered the American ledger in 1880 and never left.

An Iris in the wild is currently either four years old or celebrating an eightieth birthday, with very little middle ground. The name carries the clean economy of an early twentieth-century plant register. It reads as decisive, dryly observant, and slightly bookish. The bearer is routinely presumed to own an unusually healthy fern.