Lola
Meaning
pet form of Dolores, "sorrows"
The story
Lola is a whole century of American fashion in one word. It began as a Spanish pet form of Dolores, "sorrows," a devotional name for the Virgin, and in the early 1900s it was everywhere: nearly 15,000 babies in the 1920s. Then it fell almost to nothing, down to 528 in the 1990s, the fate of most Jazz Age names. What is unusual is what happened next. Lola came all the way back, 7,817 in the 2000s and 13,900 in the 2010s, one of the cleanest vintage revivals on record, and about 7,100 so far this decade. The sorrow is long gone from how anyone hears it now: two bright open vowels, a name for a firecracker. Songs helped, from "Whatever Lola Wants" to the Kinks, but the pattern, boom then bust then boom, is the real story.
The formal names behind Lola
Lola is an established short form of this name.
Dolores · Spanish origin · sorrows (a Marian title; a classic elder-generation Filipino name)
Lola in song
Lola
The Kinks (1970)
Ray Davies telling the story of a confused young man and the person he meets in a Soho club, still one of the most warmly human songs about gender ever to land on pop radio.
La Lola
Cafe Quijano (1999)
A swaggering, brass-driven number about a woman nobody can forget, and the song that made Cafe Quijano a household name in Spain.
On record since at least 1843: Lola Montez, dancer.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Lola peaked in the 2010s.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
484 people · the #13,708 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 500,000 · median age 44
Among people named Lola living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 2010s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 55 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Lola deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Lola 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 Lola fits with your family’s names and surname.
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