Delilah

Meaning & origin

Delilah spent most of American history in the shadow of its biblical story, for generations, calling someone a Delilah was an insult rather than a name choice. The 21st century has rewritten that completely. Rising steadily since 1993, the name reached its all-time peak in 2024 and stood at No. 51 for girls in 2025, when about one in every 389 newborn girls received it.

Sound carried much of the climb. Delilah delivers the liquid L's parents have chased in Lila, Layla, and Lilah, but stretches them across three syllables of Victorian sweep, with Lilah and Della waiting as built-in nicknames. A slow drip of sympathetic pop-culture bearers, Tom Jones's torch song, the Plain White T's' acoustic hit, the famously gentle radio host, did the rest, softening a name that once read as scandalous into one that reads as romantic.

Geographically, Delilah runs strongest in West Virginia, Wyoming, and Alaska, the rural and mountain-state pattern typical of names that catch on outside the coastal metros first. A name that peaked as recently as 2024 still has momentum, and its push toward the top 50 looks more like a beginning than a ceiling.

Delilah appears in the Book of Judges as the woman who coaxed the secret of Samson's strength from him and betrayed him to the Philistines. The derivation of the Hebrew name is debated: scholars most often connect it to the root dalal, "to hang low, languish, be weakened", fitting for a story about sapped strength, or to dal, "poor, delicate," while the widely repeated meaning "night" rests on a surface resemblance to Hebrew laylah and is generally treated as folk etymology. Because of the story, English speakers used the name only sparingly for centuries, and calling a woman "a Delilah" was an accusation. American parents began reappraising it in the 1990s, helped by its lilting double-L sound and a run of sympathetic pop-culture Delilahs, from Tom Jones's 1968 hit to the Plain White T's' "Hey There Delilah" (2007) and the soothing late-night radio host Delilah.