Rosa
- Pronunciation
- [Ro-sa]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Noted Protector
- Origin
- German
About the Name Rosa
Rosa descends from the Latin rosa meaning "rose" — referring to the iconic flower that has been continuously associated with love, beauty, and the Virgin Mary across Western European Catholic tradition for over a millennium. The name has been used continuously across Italian-Catholic, Spanish-speaking, and broader European naming traditions for centuries.
The name's overwhelming modern American cultural anchor is American civil rights activist Rosa Parks (Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, 1913–2005, the iconic African-American civil rights pioneer whose iconic 1955 refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott — a foundational moment of the American Civil Rights Movement).
Other notable bearers include American politician Rosa DeLauro (born 1943, US Representative); the iconic Mexican-American singer Rosa Mexicana; and the iconic Spanish painter Rosa Bonheur (using Bonheur as a surname, 1822–1899, the iconic French Realist painter whose iconic The Horse Fair 1855 made her one of the foundational figures of 19th-century European art). Rosa held a US top-50 girls' rank from 1880 through 1925. After a long mid-20th-century quiet period, the name has been climbing back through the 2010s and 2020s as part of the broader vintage-revival wave alongside Hattie, Sadie, and Mae. Rosa climbed back into the US top 300 girls' rank by 2018 and the top 300 since. The name's appeal is its layered Latin-Italian-Catholic-Marian-American-Civil-Rights pedigree combined with two firm syllables — the in-built rose-flower iconic register, the strong Rosa Parks American Civil Rights cultural anchor, and tonal warmth distinctive to vintage-revival names. Two firm syllables, soft consonants, and the name reads as both classical-Latin and contemporary American. Common nicknames Rosie (alternate, a popular standalone name on its own), Rose (back-end shortening, a popular standalone name), Rosita, and the rare Sa each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Rosa (essentially identical across Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/Polish), Rosé (French alternate), and Roza have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Rose (English), Rosa (essentially identical across Romance languages), Rosé (French), Roza (Slavic), and the original Latin rosa.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Rosa
US Popularity History (1880–2025)
Annual US births named Rosa by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1912 with 1,305 girls named Rosa (girl rank #94 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #653 for girls (441 US births). That's 559 places below its 1912 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 Rosa 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 Rosa the strongest states are Nebraska, Nevada, California.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nebraska | #425 | 29 |
| 2 | Nevada | #433 | 21 |
| 3 | California | #528 | 629 |
| 4 | Texas | #538 | 560 |
| 5 | Alabama | #546 | 67 |
| 6 | Kansas | #603 | 40 |
| 7 | Oregon | #606 | 52 |
| 8 | Pennsylvania | #616 | 142 |
| 9 | Tennessee | #621 | 86 |
| 10 | Arizona | #622 | 106 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Rosa in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Famous People Named Rosa
2 notable figures from history and culture who share the name Rosa.
- Rosa Luxemburg was a German Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist.
- Rosa Parks — Civil Rights Leader (1913)
Looking for names like Rosa?
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 Rosa to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Rosa 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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