Willa derived from the Germanic name Willehelm meaning ‘vehement protector’, composed of ‘willo’ for ‘will, desire’ and ‘helm’ for ‘helmet, protection’. Another name with the same origin is William.
Willa is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Willa 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, Willa ranks 418. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Willa. In the entire USA, approximately 24,939 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Willa. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Willa derived from the Germanic name Willehelm meaning ‘vehement protector’, composed of ‘willo’ for ‘will, desire’ and ‘helm’ for ‘helmet, protection’. Another name with the same origin is William.
Willa is very rare,... but known in the US since at least the 19th century. It was also used in the Middle Ages, at least since the 10th century.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Willa annualy. This means that there have been girls named Willa 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 Willa have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Willa even more than any other time: in 1932, it holds its present record of #263 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Willa was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Willa has never been ranked higher than #263. In 2022, she rivaled the 366 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 785 girls named Willa were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Willa were born, there have been 31 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The W is really rare as a first letter for girls' names: only 0.8% of all common girls' names in the US begin with a W. The most common first letters of girls' names, by the way, are A, S and M, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of girls' names.
With five letters, the name Willa 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 0.8% of all girls' names start with a W, all other letters occur on average five times as often as the W. Nevertheless, individual girls' names with W are quite popular, the most common currently being Wanda.
If your name is Willa 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 Willa, you can simply say:
Windmill
Igloo
Lion
Lion
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Willa
Willa
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
W
I
L
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.
W
I
L
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. Willa sounds like this:
