Camila

Meaning & origin

Camila arrived in the American top 20 by way of two empires: ancient Rome, which supplied the legend of the warrior queen Camilla, and the Latin-pop present, which supplied Camila Cabello. Virgil's Camilla could outrun the wind; the modern name has shown similar speed, climbing steadily since 1985 from near-invisibility to 19th place among American girls in 2025, when about 1 in every 244 newborn girls received it.

The single-l spelling is the Spanish and Portuguese one, and its geography says so plainly: New Mexico, California, and Nevada are its strongest states. Camila now functions as a marker of the broader shift in the American name pool, sitting alongside Sofia, Valentina, and Mateo, names fully fluent in both English and Spanish. Its 2020 peak has barely eroded, suggesting a long plateau rather than a fall.

Parents get flexibility in the bargain: Cami is friendly, and Mila, itself a top-30 name, hides inside as a built-in nickname. The royal association runs the other direction across the Atlantic, where Queen Camilla uses the double-l form; the American Camila reads younger, warmer, and unmistakably of this moment.

Camila is the Spanish and Portuguese spelling of Camilla, a name from Roman antiquity: in Virgil's Aeneid, Camilla is the swift-footed warrior queen of the Volsci, said to run over a field of grain without bending the stalks. In Latin, camillus and camilla were terms for freeborn children who assisted at religious ceremonies; the word's deeper origin is obscure and possibly Etruscan, so the name is best described as ancient with an unrecoverable root meaning. Camilla entered English use after Fanny Burney's 1796 novel of that name, while the single-l Camila spread throughout Latin America. In United States records Camila appears from 1914, held a low profile for decades, and began a steep climb in 1985 that tracked the growth of the country's Spanish-speaking population, accelerating in the 2010s alongside the fame of singer Camila Cabello.