Phoebe

From the Greek Phoibe, meaning bright or shining, an epithet associated with the mythological titan and the goddess Artemis. It entered English use after the Protestant Reformation via the New Testament. American record keepers logged it steadily from 1880 onward before its modern twenty-first-century climb.

For decades, the name suggested Victorian naturalists or J.D. Salinger's kid sister. A 1990s television sitcom gave it an acoustic guitar and an offbeat reputation that parents eventually folded into everyday use. Today, with an average age around twenty, the name mostly suggests a college student with a tote bag full of secondhand paperbacks. It is one of very few names whose initial diphthong survived American spelling reform intact.