Lillian

Meaning & origin

Lillian is a name with two golden ages more than a century apart. It first peaked in 1898, at the height of the Victorian flower-name craze, when Lillian Russell ruled the American stage and Lillian Gish was about to rule its screens. After the long mid-century fade that claims every generation's favorites, it rode the vintage revival back into the top tier of girls' names, and though it has been drifting down since 2012, it still ranked No. 57 in 2025, reaching about 1 in every 405 girls.

Its modern geography leans rural and northern, strongest in Vermont, Maine, and North Dakota, the same terrain where fellow antiques like Eleanor thrive. The name's practical charm is the built-in choice it offers: buttoned-up Lillian for the résumé, breezy Lily for every day. Scholars still argue over whether it began as a lily or as a nickname for Elizabeth, a genuine mystery that only adds to the appeal of a name this well documented.

Lillian's paper trail reaches back to sixteenth-century England, where Lilian appears as a given name, but its source is genuinely disputed: one school reads it as a pet form of Elizabeth, another as an elaboration of the flower name Lily, from the Latin lilium. By the Victorian era the flower association had won in practice, and Lillian boomed alongside the great flower-name fashion, peaking in the United States in 1898. It faded through the mid-twentieth century into grandmother territory, then returned with the vintage revival of the 2000s, climbing back into heavy use before beginning a gentle slide in 2012.