Stella

Meaning & origin

Over a century separates Stella's two lives. Its share of American births peaked in 1889, deep in the Victorian era, when star-names and flower-names filled the registers; by the postwar decades it had nearly vanished, surviving mostly as a punchline shouted up a New Orleans staircase in A Streetcar Named Desire. Then, starting in 1995, the revival generation rediscovered it.

The comeback has been steady rather than explosive: in 2025 Stella ranked 52nd, given to about 1 in 389 newborn girls, comfortably inside the top 100 without threatening the top 10. That trajectory, more than a hundred years between crests, is the classic shape of a four-generation revival, the arc that returns great-great-grandmother names to the nursery.

Geographically, Stella runs strongest in southern New England, with Rhode Island and Connecticut its top states, plus an outpost in Alaska. It fits squarely alongside Hazel, Clara, and Violet in the vintage cohort, with the added shine of meaning "star" in plain Latin.

Stella is the Latin word for "star," and as a given name it is largely a literary invention. Sir Philip Sidney addressed his 1580s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella to a poetic "Stella," and Jonathan Swift later used the name for Esther Johnson in his Journal to Stella. From these literary roots it spread into ordinary use in the 18th and 19th centuries, becoming a Victorian mainstay in America, it was at its strongest in the 1880s. Tennessee Williams gave it mid-century resonance in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and after a long postwar fade the name re-emerged in the 1990s as part of the broader vintage revival.

Read more: Stella on Wikipedia