Malala
Origin
Pashto
Syllables
3
Peak era
Rare
Today
▬ Steady
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
1890srare in US records2020s
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Malala has stayed rare in US records the whole time: no peak decade to name.
The Malala deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Malala 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 Malala fits with your family’s names and surname.
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