Malala
Meaning
from Malalai, an Afghan name meaning grief-stricken, honoring a 19th-century folk heroine; famously borne by Malala Yousafzai, the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Malala peaked in the 2010s.
Naming a baby, or reading about your own name?
This page serves both. The meaning above is the honest one, not the flattering one, and the curve is every Malala born in America since 1890. The deep dive below is a letter about the name itself: written for the family weighing it, and just as well for the person who has carried it all along.
The Malala deep dive
A personal letter, not a list: where Malala truly comes from, how it traveled, its century in real records, and, if you have grown a tree on nametree, exactly how it reads against your family and your last name. Add a note and it is not just quoted back at you: it changes the texture of the analysis, what the letter weighs, what it examines, what it argues with.
Our own matching engine and algorithms, built for one thing: how names fit a family. On top of that, 8,436 hand-researched names, 130 years of real records, and frontier AI. A chatbot may or may not get a meaning right; what it cannot do is any of the rest.
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