Pauline
Meaning
feminine form of Paul, 'small, humble'
The story
Pauline is the French feminine of Paul, from the Latin paulus, small or humble, and it arrived in English nurseries with the glamour of France still on it; Napoleon's dazzling sister Pauline Bonaparte had helped make it fashionable across Europe generations before America took it up in earnest. Its American heyday came early: strong through the 1910s and 1920s, exactly the years when the movie serial The Perils of Pauline had audiences returning weekly to watch its heroine escape another cliffhanger. Whether the serial fed the name or the name fed the serial, the two peaked together, and that is the kind of coincidence worth noticing. From the 1930s on, the line eases downward, decade by gentle decade, into today's quiet, steady use. What remains is soft, complete, and Parisian around the edges, a name whose modesty is written into its very meaning.
Pauline around the world
One shared root links 4 names across 3 languages.
Shared root: from Latin paulus "small, humble", the Roman cognomen Paulus
The constellation
More branches
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Pauline peaked in the 1900s and the 1920s in nearly equal measure.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
2,059 people · the #5,013 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 100,000 · median age 32
Among people named Pauline living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1980s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 29 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
When you meet Pauline
Most people given the name Pauline in the United States were born between 1940 and 1979. The Pauline you meet today is most often in her 60s or 70s.
Estimated from US Social Security birth registrations and typical lifespans; a rough guide, not a rule.
The Pauline deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Pauline 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 Pauline fits with your family’s names and surname.
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