Virginia
Meaning
maidenly, virginal; famously borne by Virginia Woolf, modernist novelist and essayist
The story
Virginia carries Rome in its bones: it comes from the old Roman clan name, linked in most tellings to virgo, and glossed for centuries as maidenly. America adopted it early and personally. The colony of Virginia was named for Elizabeth I, England's Virgin Queen, and in 1587 Virginia Dare became the first English child born in the Americas. By the early twentieth century the name was a fixture of American nurseries, peaking in the 1920s, the very decade Virginia Woolf was writing Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and reshaping the English novel. Woolf remains the name's great literary bearer, her essays and fiction still pressed into new readers' hands every year. The curve has eased gently since those heights, but Virginia never left: it holds steady today, a classic with four syllables of history behind it.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Virginia peaked in the 1920s.
Popularity in Brazil
31,528 people · the #787 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 6,452 · median age 51
The census also counted 282 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
When you meet Virginia
Most people given the name Virginia in the United States were born between 1940 and 1979. The Virginia 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 Virginia deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Virginia 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 Virginia fits with your family’s names and surname.
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