Amelia

Meaning & origin

Amelia Earhart settled the question of whether this name could carry ambition; before her it belonged to Hanoverian princesses and a Fielding heroine, and beneath all of them sits a Germanic root meaning work and vigor. The long confusion with Emilia, a different name from a Roman family, only added to its reach.

American parents rediscovered it in 1986, and the climb from there was long and unbroken: Amelia entered the top five in the late 2010s, peaked in 2021, and held No. 4 in 2025, when about 1 in every 127 newborn girls received it. Its trajectory has now flattened at altitude, the usual pattern for a name transitioning from fashionable to established.

The state-level data put its strongest markets in Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont, small, rural states that consistently lead on polished antique revivals. Within a sibling set it plays flagship alongside the same cohort: Charlotte and Eleanor for sisters, Oliver and Henry for brothers, with Millie and Mia keeping the everyday versions light.

Amelia descends from Germanic Amalia, built on the root amal, "work" or "vigor", the element behind the Amali, the royal dynasty of the Ostrogoths. In English use it has been tangled for centuries with Emilia, which comes from the entirely separate Roman family name Aemilius; the two are etymologically distinct but were treated as interchangeable long before modern references sorted them out. The name's English fortunes rose in the eighteenth century with two Hanoverian princesses named Amelia and with Henry Fielding's 1751 novel of that name, and Amelia Earhart gave it an aviator's dash in the twentieth. In American records it was a solid nineteenth-century choice that thinned by mid-century, then began rising in 1986 toward its current place in the top five.

Read more: Amelia on Wikipedia