Sabrina: Meaning of Baby Name Sabrina

About the Name Sabrina

Sabrina descends from the legendary princess Sabrina of Old British/Welsh mythology — the daughter of King Locrinus and Estrildis, who was drowned in the River Severn (Welsh Hafren) by her father's wife. According to medieval Welsh tradition, Sabrina became the goddess/spirit of the river, which is named for her. The name appears in John Milton's 1634 masque Comus as the river-spirit Sabrina, and in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

The name's overwhelming modern cultural anchor is the title character of the 1954 American film Sabrina (directed by Billy Wilder, starring Audrey Hepburn) and the iconic Sabrina the Teenage Witch from the long-running Archie Comics character (1962–present), the 1996–2003 ABC sitcom (starring Melissa Joan Hart), and the 2018 Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The Sabrina-witch cultural anchor has been continuously the most-influential modern American Sabrina reference.

Sabrina's American climb peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, reaching the US top 100 girls' rank from 1986 through 1999. The name has receded since but remains in steady use, currently sitting in the US top 300 girls' rank. The name's appeal is its layered Welsh-British-mythological pedigree combined with three flowing syllables — the in-built river-goddess literary register, the strong Sabrina-the-Witch cultural anchor, and tonal warmth distinctive to multi-cultural names. Common nicknames Sabby, Brina, Sab, Sabi, and the rare Brie each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Sabrina, Sabryna, and Sabreena have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Sabrina (essentially identical across European languages) and the original Welsh river-goddess Sabrina.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.

Quick Facts About Sabrina

5,642

English baby names in our dictionary

2,251

English female names

254

7-letter S-names in our dictionary

481

S-female names total

1977–2025

years of US SSA records (35 total)

75,110

total US births named Sabrina (all years)

US Popularity History (1977–2025)

🔥 Rising fast: Sabrina climbed 67 places in the US girls ranking over the last 5 years (#388 in 2020 → #321 in 2025).

Annual US births named Sabrina by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1997 with 5,816 girls named Sabrina (girl rank #53 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #321 for girls (956 US births). That's 268 places below its 1997 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.

Where in the US Is Sabrina 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 Sabrina the strongest states are Florida, New Jersey, New York.

Strongest girls-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Florida	#227	741
2	New Jersey	#276	284
3	New York	#301	564
4	California	#332	1,012
5	Connecticut	#347	95
6	Nevada	#352	83
7	Minnesota	#358	151
8	Pennsylvania	#362	290
9	Massachusetts	#373	160
10	Ohio	#401	266

Weakest girls-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Louisiana	#778	32
2	South Carolina	#655	61
3	North Carolina	#652	158
4	Tennessee	#619	114
5	Indiana	#600	99
6	Wisconsin	#599	89
7	Oklahoma	#592	65
8	Alabama	#581	36
9	Kentucky	#568	75
10	Colorado	#559	85

Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Sabrina in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.

Variant Forms

Name	Meaning	Gender	Origin
Brina	Strong	Female	Irish
Zabrina	Forms Of Sabrina: A Princess	Female	English

Looking for names like Sabrina?

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.

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Compare Sabrina to Other Popular Names

Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Sabrina against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).

Sabrina vs Olivia 210,124 births since 2014

Sabrina vs Emma 202,477 births since 2014

Sabrina vs Sophia 169,709 births since 2014

Sabrina vs Isabella 158,431 births since 2014

Sabrina vs Ava 157,356 births since 2014

Sabrina vs Charlotte 151,872 births since 2014

Sabrina vs Mia 149,779 births since 2014

Sabrina vs Amelia 142,728 births since 2014

Compare to a different name →