Luna
- Pronunciation
- [Lu-na]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Moon
- Origin
- Spanish
About the Name Luna
Luna is the Latin word for "moon" — and in Roman religion, also the name of the moon goddess, the Latin equivalent of the Greek Selene. Luna was one of the major celestial deities of the Roman pantheon, paired with Sol (the sun) and depicted in Roman art driving a chariot pulled by oxen, white horses, or sometimes deer across the night sky. The name carries the inherent register of celestial femininity — a trait that has only deepened across two millennia of subsequent associations.
Despite Luna's Roman pedigree, the name had little use as a personal name in pre-modern English-speaking countries. Its widespread adoption as a girls' name is largely a 21st-century phenomenon, accelerated by several modern fictional bearers: most notably Luna Lovegood, the eccentric, dreamy Ravenclaw student in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (introduced in Order of the Phoenix, 2003); and Luna, the moon-goddess-coded character in Sailor Moon. Singer Luna (Park Sun-young of K-pop group f(x)) also contributed.
Luna's American climb is one of the most dramatic recent naming surges: from outside the US top 1000 in 2003 to the top 15 by 2020 — a rise driven primarily by celebrity baby announcements (notably John Legend and Chrissy Teigen's daughter, born 2016) and the broader return to short, vowel-rich, mythological girls' names alongside Aria and Mia. The name's appeal is its compact mystery — two syllables, soft consonants, instantly readable in nearly every European language, and the inherent lunar-celestial register. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — Lu and the rare Loon occasionally appear. International forms include the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Luna (all identical), and the Romanian Luna ("month" by extension).
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Luna
US Popularity History (2003–2025)
Annual US births named Luna by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2022 with 8,967 girls named Luna (girl rank #10 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #27 for girls (6,076 US births). That's 17 places below its 2022 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Luna Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Luna the strongest states are Nevada, Hawaii, California.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nevada | #11 | 890 |
| 2 | Hawaii | #12 | 285 |
| 3 | California | #12 | 11,623 |
| 4 | Arizona | #14 | 1,924 |
| 5 | Florida | #16 | 4,814 |
| 6 | New Mexico | #16 | 411 |
| 7 | Oregon | #19 | 813 |
| 8 | Washington | #23 | 1,506 |
| 9 | Rhode Island | #23 | 246 |
| 10 | Texas | #24 | 6,999 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mississippi | #121 | 269 |
| 2 | District of Columbia | #91 | 113 |
| 3 | North Dakota | #81 | 109 |
| 4 | Alabama | #79 | 527 |
| 5 | Louisiana | #68 | 520 |
| 6 | New Hampshire | #68 | 175 |
| 7 | West Virginia | #65 | 225 |
| 8 | South Dakota | #61 | 132 |
| 9 | Montana | #58 | 139 |
| 10 | Maine | #54 | 166 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Luna in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lunetta | Little Moon | Female | Italian |
Looking for names like Luna?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Luna to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Luna against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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