105 Latin Names for Girls, From Roman Classics to Rare Finds

Latin girl names carry a longer paper trail than almost any other group you can choose from, and this list of 105 runs from names on the current U.S. top 100 all the way down to ones the federal data has never recorded even once.

Every popularity figure here comes from the Social Security Administration’s national baby-name records, so you can see exactly how used a name is in America right now rather than guessing ⁽¹⁾. Each entry also gives the origin, the meaning, a plain phonetic pronunciation, and, where a notable bearer exists, the real women who have worn it.

Start anywhere. The names are alphabetical, and the popularity chart below shows how a handful of them have moved since 1965.

Which Latin Girl Names Are Popular in the U.S. Right Now?

Six of the 105 names here sit inside the current U.S. top 100, per the SSA: Olivia at #1, Aurora at #15 and Valentina at #35, followed by Emilia, Vivian and Lucia. All six are measured on 2025 births.

Olivia has held the number one spot for seven years running. Everything below that top group ranges from lightly used to effectively unrecorded. Rufina is the rarest name here that the data still lists, at #14,599 in 2025, or roughly one girl in 250,000, according to SSA figures.

Direction matters more than position if you want a name that is arriving rather than leaving. Theodosia is the fastest riser on this list, up about 357 percent when the last ten years of births are set against the ten before them, according to the same data. Deanna is the steepest faller over that window, down about 66 percent. Zola is the longest comeback of all: it peaked in 1913, bottomed out around 1980, and has recovered roughly 35-fold in the 112 years since.

Heritage is doing a lot of the work behind that movement. “We’re seeing that as a rising trend around the world that parents are more interested in going back to heritage,” says Sophie Kihm, editor at Nameberry.

The chart below plots the five most popular names on the list: Olivia, Aurora, Valentina, Emilia and Vivian. Names of roughly the same vintage can move in completely different directions, which is the useful thing to see.

One limit worth stating plainly. Every figure on this page comes from U.S. birth registrations. It tells you nothing about how common a name is in Italy, Mexico, Poland or Brazil, and this list draws on all of them.

How Did the Romans Actually Name Their Daughters?

Roman women had no personal first name at all. A daughter was called by the feminine form of her father’s gens, the clan name, so every daughter of the gens Cornelia was simply Cornelia and every daughter of the Julii was Julia ⁽²⁾.

Two sisters were told apart as Maior and Minor, the elder and the younger. Three or more took ordinals: Tertia, Quarta, Quinta. By the late Republic a woman often added the feminine of her father’s cognomen as well, which is how the record gives us Caecilia Metella and Clodia Pulchra.

That history explains why so many names on this list started out as family labels rather than personal choices. Claudia, Cornelia, Julia, Aurelia, Marcella, Valeria and Livia were all clan names first. They only became individual names centuries later, once Christian Europe began naming children after saints instead of ancestors.

A Roman woman also kept her birth family’s name after marriage. That was ordinary there, and it would not become ordinary again in the West for close to two thousand years.

The language did not so much die as divide. Vulgar Latin separated into the Romance languages between the fifth and ninth centuries, and those languages now have close to 920 million native speakers between them ⁽³⁾. Every Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian name below is a Latin name that simply kept going.

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