Lila
Meaning
"night"
The story
Lila is the night in Arabic, worn smooth, and it beat its own sister home. A true vintage, it counted more than 10,000 girls in the 1920s, faded to about 1,200 in the 1970s, and then returned in force: about 9,000 in the 2000s, 16,600 in the 2010s, and 8,500 so far this decade, every one of them a girl. Its h-sister Lilah, one letter longer, made the same journey a step behind and entered our records' worklist one batch earlier; the two chart separately, alongside Layla, Leila and Delilah, and the soft double-l sound they share is one of the era's largest families. In our records Lila counts about 75,800 girls against 57 boys ever. The name rested a generation and more, which is exactly what the revival rule requires, and the night, as ever, needs no explanation.
Lila around the world
One shared root links 7 names across 3 languages.
Shared root: from Arabic layl "night", spread by the seventh-century romance of Layla and Majnun
The constellation
More branches
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Lila peaked in the 2010s.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
2,175 people · the #4,830 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 90,909 · median age 49
The census also counted 111 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Lila deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Lila truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Lila fits with your family’s names and surname.
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