Leila is the usual Persian transcription of the Arabic name Layla, which means ‘night’ or ‘dark beauty’.
Leila is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Leila 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, Leila ranks 213. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 9 were named Leila. In the entire USA, approximately 41,768 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Leila. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Leila is the usual Persian transcription of the Arabic name Layla, which means ‘night’ or ‘dark beauty’.
Leila is the title of... a 1981 song by American rock band ZZ Top.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Leila annualy. This means that there have been girls named Leila who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus women named Leila have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Leila even more than any other time: in 1880, it holds its present record of rank #160 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Leila was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Leila has never been ranked higher than #160. In 2022, she rivaled the 231 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 1,237 girls named Leila were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Leila were born, there have been 197 newborns who received this name.
The name Leila may not be in the top rankings of the most popular girls’ names, but it is one of the few female given names, along with only 536 others, that can be found in every single state in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and from California to New York. Of course, the name occurs more frequently in some states than in others – and Leila is apparently especially popular in Hawaii. Although the name is not one of the top 100 most popular women’s names here either, one in 667 women in Hawaii is called Leila. In total, that’s 662 women who feel addressed when the name Leila is shouted loudly across Hawaii and who ensure that their name makes it to #190 in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common female names in this nice state. If you asked all women in the entire U.S. for their first name, you would hear Leila as the answer a total of 41,768 times. This places Leila at #576 in our SmartGenius statistics for the most popular women’s names in the whole of the USA. This is true for all currently living women across all states and age groups – the recent popularity of the name Leila as a baby name is, of course, a bit different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter L is a particularly popular initial letter for girls' names – 6.8% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for girls’ names are A and S.
With five letters, the name Leila 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 with 6.8% of all girls' names that begin with an L, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average. If you are now wondering which girls' name with L is the most common... the answer is Linda.
If your name is Leila 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 Leila, you can simply say:
Lion
Elephant
Igloo
Lion
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Leila
Leila
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
L
E
I
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.
L
E
I
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. Leila sounds like this:
