Zella
About 13,369 American babies have been named Zella since 1880, most of them around 1917. In 2025 it ranked 1,733rd. About 4,200 Zellas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 16.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Zella
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 13,369
- Estimated living today
- 4,200
- Median age today
- 16
- Peak year
- 1917
- Best rank
- 363rd
- Rank in 2025
- 1,733rd
- First recorded
- 1880
How old the living Zellas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 13,369 babies given the name since 1880, about 4,200 are alive — 31 in every hundred. Roughly 2,200 of them are children and 1,400 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2009 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.
Notable Zellas
- Zella Day (born 1995)American singer-songwriter
People named Zella with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Zella is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Zella is most concentrated in Kentucky (6.4×), Oklahoma (4.8×), West Virginia (4.4×), Arkansas (3.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1917
The most popular girls’ names the year Zella peaked:
Zella elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Zella | 14 | 4,535th |
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.
Related names
Zella against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.