Ella

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Ella boys named Ella

By the numbers

Total US births

352,214

Estimated living today

226,000

Median age today

14

Peak year

2010

Best rank

13th

Rank in 2025

29th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

351,313 / 901

How old the living Ellas are

born that year still alive today

Of the 352,214 babies given the name since 1880, about 226,000 are alive — 64 in every hundred. Roughly 142,000 of them are children and 24,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2011 and half after.

An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.

Where the name comes from

A 19th-century shortening of Eleanor or Ellen, later also used for any name ending in -ella, such as Gabriella or Daniella. Similar abbreviations have been formed independently in many European languages, for any name containing the syllable -el-, e.g.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Ellas

• Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996)American jazz singer
• Ella Purnell (born 1996)English-born British actress
• Ella Josephine Baker (1903–1986)African-American civil rights and human rights activist
• Ella Balinska (born 1996)English actress
• Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919)American author and poet
• Ella Henderson (born 1996)British singer
• Ella Toone (born 1999)English association football player
• Ella Raines (1920–1988)American actress

People named Ella with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Ella is most common

• CA20,770
• TX20,303
• NY15,695
• NC13,784
• PA13,607
• GA12,528
• FL11,834
• OH11,665
• IL10,931
• AL9,817

Relative to how many babies each state records, Ella is most concentrated in Mississippi (2.0×), South Carolina (1.9×), Alabama (1.7×), North Carolina (1.6×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 2010

The most popular girls’ names the year Ella peaked:

• Isabella
• Sophia
• Emma
• Olivia
• Ava
• Emily

All the names of 2010

Ella elsewhere

Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.

Ella: births by region

Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.

By canton, Ella is most concentrated in Basel-Stadt, where 0.38% of children were given it – 142 of them.

Ella: rank by region

In 2025, Ella was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2025, Ella was given 2 times or more in 4 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Ella appears in the lists for Province of Limburg (2nd), Province of Flemish Brabant (3rd), Province of Antwerp (5th), Province of East Flanders (9th), Province of West Flanders (12th), Province of Liège (51st), Province of Hainaut (64th) and Brussels-Capital Region (85th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Ella by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Ella among the living

How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.

A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026, the Netherlands on 1 January 2018 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.

Where Ella lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 689 women called Ella were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Women: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 23 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 29 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Ellen
• Ellie
• Elliott
• Elliot
• Ellis
• Elliana
• Elle
• Ellison
• Ellsworth
• Ellery
• Ellianna
• Elly

Ella against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Ella vs Ellen
• Ella vs Ellie
• Ella vs Elliott
• Ella vs Elliot
• Ella vs Ellis
• Ella vs Elliana

Compare Ella with a name of your own