Kayla is originally a Yiddish name meaning “slim and fair”. It is a variant of the name Kaila and can also be found in Hebrew as Kelila. Though it can stand on its own, Kayla was seen as a popular nickname for Mikayla since the 1950s.
Kayla is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Kayla isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all girls names, Kayla ranks 127. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 14 were named Kayla. In the entire USA, approximately 341,010 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Kayla. That is 0.10 % of all living Americans.
Kayla is originally a Yiddish name meaning “slim and fair”. It is a variant of the name Kaila and can also be found in Hebrew as Kelila. Though it can stand on its own, Kayla was seen as a popular nickname for Mikayla since the 1950s.
What is Yiddish? Yiddish is a language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It is a Germanic language that is written in Hebrew script and has many Slavic, Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords. It was the primary language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe before World War II.
This was a real surprise! Kayla is a name that has been around for a long time, but only really took off at the end of the 20th century. According to our SmartGenius statistics, it reached its highest rank at #10 in the year 1996, when 15,291 parents chose this name for their newborn daughter. This made Kayla much more popular than in previous generations, where it was so rare for several years that it was not even recorded in the statistics. Now, this name seems to have found its place and has established itself in the beginning of the 21st century as well.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Kayla was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Kayla ranked 261 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to baby girls a total of 1,128 times. No one knows what names (or combinations of numbers and letters) will be popular 50 years from now, but given its consistent popularity, there is a good chance that Kayla will remain a universally popular name.
There are only 537 different women’s names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Kayla is one of them. However, Kayla is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Nevada seem to particularly fancy this name – the 2,196 women called Kayla who live here are 0,492% of all female residents and push their name up to #35, easily placing it in the top 100 most common female names in Nevada.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter K is a real popular first letter for girls' names. That’s because 7.5% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters A, S and M are more common for girls' names.
With five letters, the name Kayla is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
That means that if 7.5% of all girls' names start with a K, this initial letter occurs more than twice as often as all 26 letters on average. Interesting detail: of all the girls' names that begin with a K, Karen is the most common.
If your name is Kayla and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Kayla, you can simply say:
Koala
Apple
Yoyo
Lion
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Kayla
Kayla
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
A
Y
L
A
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
K
A
Y
L
A
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Kayla sounds like this:
