A star is said to grace the cover — this is the one book where Grace really does

Grace goes back to the Latin gratia — favor, kindness, a gift given freely and not because it was earned. The word crossed into English through Old French centuries before anyone used it as a name, which is why it still works as both: you can say grace before dinner, play a grace note on the piano, be given a grace period on your library books.

Long before it was a first name, Greek myth had the three Graces — the Charites, goddesses of charm, beauty and festivity, whom Renaissance painters like Botticelli and Raphael kept returning to. It's part of why the name has never felt stern the way some virtue names do: grace was always the virtue you could dance to.

As a given name, Grace took hold in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Puritan families began naming their daughters after virtues. Most of those names now read like entries in a parish register; Grace is the one that never left. It has spent the past two decades inside the top thirty girls' names in the United States, has repeatedly topped the charts in Ireland, and rode high in the top ten in England and Wales through the 2000s — a four-hundred-year-old name that never had to make a comeback, because it never went away.

The name has been carried well. Grace Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral who helped invent the compiler — modern programming stands on her work. Grace Kelly won an Oscar and then became an actual princess, which remains the most on-brand career move any Grace has made. And in 1838, Grace Darling, a lighthouse keeper's twenty-two-year-old daughter, rowed into a North Sea storm to rescue survivors of a wrecked steamship and became a national heroine. Scientist, princess, rescuer — a decent range of role models for one syllable.

The name even has its own soundtrack. "Amazing Grace", written in 1772, has been recorded thousands of times — by gospel choirs, folk singers and bagpipers — which makes Grace one of the very few names an entire congregation can sing.

And it is just one syllable: a soft landing that starts with a gentle gr- and closes on a hush. In a story read at bedtime that matters — Grace never trips the tongue, rhymes gently with place, space and embrace, the vocabulary of adventure endings, and lands as softly at the end of a chapter as it does at the end of a day.

• Gracie — The kitchen-table form: what she's called when dinner is ready or a scraped knee needs kissing. Warmer and bouncier than the full name, and for many girls it's simply who they are until school starts. If she's Gracie at home, the story can call her Gracie too.
• Gray / Grae — The cool short form some Graces adopt around the classroom years — quick to shout across a playground and a little tomboyish, which rather suits a girl in a superhero cape. It also gives her a ready-made grown-up signature for later.
• Gigi — The toddler-era doubling, and often the version a younger sibling manages first. It tends to survive as a private family name long after everyone else has gone back to the full form.
• Grace — The full form is only one syllable, so plenty of families never shorten it at all. It's also the version teachers, certificates and — someday — book covers use.