Sonnet comes from the poetic term for a short lyric form, from French and Italian literary roots.
Sonnet arrives as a name carrying the full weight of Western literary tradition in fourteen lines. The word descends from the Italian "sonnetto," a diminutive of "suono" (sound), meaning literally "little song." The form was codified in 13th-century Sicily, perfected by Petrarch in his "Canzoniere" — a sequence of 366 sonnets addressed to the idealized Laura — and carried into English by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard in the 16th century.
Shakespeare made the form so definitively his own that his 154 sonnets remain among the most quoted poems in the English language, their openings — "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" — embedded in the cultural nervous system. As a given name, Sonnet is rare to the point of audacity, and that is precisely its appeal.
It belongs to a category of literary names — alongside Poet, Story, Lyric, and Verse — that declare a parent's values as clearly as any family crest. The name was brought into wider public awareness when actor Forest Whitaker named his daughter Sonnet in the 1990s, a choice that demonstrated the name's capacity to feel both eccentric and utterly natural. Sonnet carries a particular resonance as a girl's name: the Petrarchan sonnet tradition was built around the idealization of a female subject, yet the poets who wielded the form — Browning, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne — were male.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese," in which a woman claims the sonnet as her own voice ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"), offers a counter-tradition that makes Sonnet a quietly feminist literary inheritance. It is a name for parents who believe language is the most beautiful thing humans make.