National Lisa Day

Lisa Gherardini was born in Florence in 1479. She married a silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo and had six children with him. Leonardo painted her, and the Louvre still catalogues the picture under her own name.

In October 1503 a chancery clerk named Agostino Vespucci was reading Cicero. In the margin he noted that Leonardo was then at work on the head of Lisa del Giocondo. The book surfaced in a Heidelberg library in 2005.

America came to it late. Lisa is absent from the Social Security Administration's two hundred most popular girls' names for the 1930s. It arrives at thirty-seventh in the 1950s.

The 1960s belong to it outright. Across those ten years 496,987 American girls were named Lisa. Then the fall: the 1990s were its last decade on the list, and it finished there at 118th.

Elizabeth never moved. The full name has stayed inside the American top twenty-one in every decade since the 1950s. The short form burned through its entire American life in the time the long one barely stirred.