Wole
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Meaning
short form of a longer name meaning roughly 'the brave one comes into the house'; famously borne by Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate playwright
The story
Wole is a Yoruba name from Nigeria, a short form of a longer name traditionally glossed along the lines of the brave one comes into the house, an arrival announced with confidence. The name's global fame rests on Wole Soyinka, the playwright, poet, and memoirist who in 1986 became the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His plays, among them Death and the King's Horseman, braid Yoruba tradition with a fearless political voice, and his decades of activism, including imprisonment during Nigeria's civil war, made him a moral figure as much as a literary one. In the United States, Wole has essentially no statistical history: it registered for the first time in the 2020s and remains genuinely rare, a two-syllable name that is short to say and very long on legacy.
How popular is Wole around the world?
Wole does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
United States
under 5 a year
Wole does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
Births with a Social Security record. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration
Not on the record in Spain, Mexico City, Argentina, Puerto Rico, England and Wales, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and Poland: those registries withhold small counts, so rare uses may sit below their floors.
Not on the Chile record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 5 registrations in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the Montevideo record for 1940 to 2011: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the France record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 20 births in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the South Australia record for 1944 to 2017: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the Austria record for 1984 to 2025: Statistik Austria publishes every first name down to a single birth, so this name was not given there in those years (before 2010 the record covers babies with Austrian citizenship only). Not on Norway’s list: Statistics Norway lists only first names carried by 200 or more living people, so rarer names are not shown.
Keep exploring
Yoruba baby names · Names of poets and writers · Short names
The Wole deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Wole 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 Wole fits with your family’s names and surname.
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