Holding steady.
Popularity of Lavonna since 1918
Babies named Lavonna per year in U.S. Social Security records. Raw births topped out in 1963, but relative to how few babies were recorded back then, Lavonna's real moment was 1937.
Data table (by decade)
| Decade | Girls |
|---|---|
| 1910s | 5 |
| 1920s | 130 |
| 1930s | 269 |
| 1940s | 253 |
| 1950s | 341 |
| 1960s | 384 |
| 1970s | 196 |
| 1980s | 162 |
| 1990s | 142 |
| 2000s | 42 |
| 2010s | 37 |
| 2020s | 19 |
Meaning & origin
A relic of early 20th-century American name invention, Lavonna appeared on the U.S. naming scene starting in 1918. It reached its highest popularity in 1937, but even then it did not crack the top 1,000 nationally. The name's trajectory shows it has been remarkably stable in its rarity, with very few annual births recorded in recent decades. By 2025, the name is virtually unseen among newborns. Lavonna is a snapshot of a naming fashion that blended familiar sounds like the La- prefix with the ending -vonna, echoing the more common Lavonne. Its top states of usage are not recorded, likely because it never reached a high enough concentration in any single state to appear in the Social Security Administration's data. Today Lavonna carries a distinctly vintage feel, tied to the era of the 1930s.
Lavonna appears to be a 20th-century coinage, likely formed by combining the fashionable prefix La- (common in inventive names of the era) with the name Von, itself a variant of Vaughn. It may also be a creative respelling of Lavonia or Lavonne, names with uncertain origins but sometimes linked to the Latin 'laetus' (happy). The name saw its peak usage in the 1930s, particularly in the United States, but the reasons for its emergence are not well documented.
Nicknames & variants
Nicknames: Lav, Vonna, Lavi
Sibling names for Lavonna
Names that share Lavonna's style, for a brother or sister.
