Badass Girl Names

Enticing modern nickname name possibility.

While the most famous Channing is the very male Channing Tatum, the name is now given about a third of the time for girls. It makes an attractive surname-name for either gender.

This is a rare and lovely form of Susannah commonly heard in Israel. Shoshana Shapiro — nicknamed Shosh — is the character played by Zosia Mamet on the hit HBO series Girls — a fact that could give the name an upward thrust.

The name of an affluent suburb of Columbus, Ohio and a section of Greater London, Bexley is increasingly being coopted by parents looking for a novel name in the Kinsley/AInsley/Paisley family. Bexley debuted on the US Top 1000 in 2016 and is definitely one of the trendiest girl names starting with B. Think of it as a 21st century Becky.

Novelist Djuna Barnes introduced this interesting and unusual name with an arty, Bohemian feel to the mix. She explained that it was invented by her father, saying it came about as a combination of her infant brother's pronunciation of the word moon as 'nuna' and a character in a book her father was reading, Prince Djalma, and so he "put the Dj onto the 'una'." Result: the silent-D pronunciation (as in Django) of JOON-a.

Regal Kingsley seems like an all-boy name, but a growing number of parents have bestowed this name on a girl. Credit the ever-trendier -ley suffix.

Jupiter may be known as the father of all the gods, but it's baby girls who have claimed his name for their own. Mythological and celestial baby names are hot across the board, so Jupiter was bound to rise in popularity. But the reason it's currently mostly female in the US is thanks to its similarities to the trendy feminine name Juniper.

We usually think of place-names as a modern invention, but in fact Arizona ranked on the US Top 1000 from its inception in 1880 until 1911, when it vanished below the surface. It peaked at Number 510 in 1882, before Arizona became a state. One notorious vintage bearer: criminal "Ma" Barker, born Arizona Clark.

Scheherazade -- or Sheherazade --is a legendary Persian queen immortalized as the narrator of all one thousand stories in the One Thousand and One Nights. Her story is even more remarkable than the tales she tells.

Charming nature name made even more appealing by the connection to iconic nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale.

Alaska's Denali National Park is the home of the highest mountain in the US, officially renamed Denali in 2014, endowing the name with a lofty feel. Twice as many girls as boys were given the name in 2021, but the gender gap is closing.

Lucero is a relative or nickname of Luz, meaning light. This intriguing name is swimming just beneath the Top 1000 for girls in the US.

Diablo Cody, self-named (she's really Brook Busey) screenwriter of Juno, singlehandedly helped popularize not just her heroine's name and her own but all o-ending names for girls. You don't need us to tell you that it takes a brave parent, in every way, to name a baby Diablo. Diablo is one of the Spanish baby names that diverges furthest from the well-paved camino.

This diminutive of Kimberley is gaining momentum as a standalone name. For our part, we're stumped by its rise.

Possibly a derivative variation of Yara, a popular name in Spanish-speaking countries meaning butterfly, Yareli was given to more than 400 baby girls in the US last year.

Justice is a fashionable word name, used for both girls and boys. Justice has the distinction of being a virtue name without the religious implications of Faith or Grace. It still feels more male than female, perhaps partly due to the classic Roman name Justus, but Justice has become a more common pick for girls in recent years.

In Buddhism, Dharma embodies the basic principles of cosmic existence--making it a fitting name for the hippyish character on the sitcom Dharma and Greg, whose middle name was Freedom.

For most, Eureka will be tied up with the bathtub myth of Archimedes' discovery of volumetric displacement, making it linked to the idea of invention, discovery and innovation. Some Australians might more closely link it to the Eureka stockade, a 19th Century rebellion of miners and workers against the colonial British government. Amanda Knox named her baby girl Eureka in 2021.

Name of the 7th century BC Greek lyric poet born on the island of Lesbos, whose name has been synonymous with lesbian love. Though this name is rarely used today, it certainly could be and, some might say, SHOULD be revived.

This biblical place-name for the region now known as Yemen started to feel fresh again as the name of the heroine of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal, played on screen by Cate Blanchett.