A variant of Skylar, originally a surname meaning scholar or shelter, now used as a given name.
Skilar is a streamlined variant of Skylar and Skyler, names rooted in the Dutch surname Schuyler — from the Dutch *schuler*, meaning "scholar" or "student," though some etymologists connect it to a Germanic root meaning "shelter" or "refuge." The Schuyler family arrived in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and became one of New York's most prominent Dutch patrician families. Philip Schuyler, Revolutionary War general and father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, made the name a piece of early American history — a connection that the musical *Hamilton* (2015) brought to new generations.
The transformation from Schuyler to Skyler and then Skylar reflected an Americanizing impulse: simplify the Dutch spelling, let the word point upward toward sky rather than backward toward scholarship. By the 1980s and 1990s, Skylar had detached almost entirely from its Dutch origins and floated free as a thoroughly modern American name, bright with the open-air associations of its near-homophone. The television series *Breaking Bad* gave the name Skylar wide recognition, while the gender-neutral trend of the 1990s and 2000s saw it embraced for children of any gender.
Skilar, with its distinctive -ar ending (rather than -ar's common companion -er), and its simplified initial Sk-, sits at the sleek edge of this evolution. It looks clean on a page, sounds energetic in a room, and carries the sky's associations — freedom, height, open possibility — without any of the heaviness of the surname tradition that preceded it. It is a name that has successfully shed its history to become purely, joyfully itself.