Violet
- Pronunciation
- [VI-o-let]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Flower
- Origin
- Italian
About the Name Violet
Violet is one of the small group of English flower names — alongside Lily, Rose, Daisy, and Iris — that emerged as personal names during the late Victorian flower-language revival. The violet flower itself carries layered symbolic weight in Western tradition: in classical mythology, violets sprang from the blood of Attis (lover of Cybele); in medieval Christianity, the violet symbolized humility and the Virgin Mary's modesty; in Napoleonic France, the violet became a Bonapartist symbol after Napoleon's exile ("I will return with the violets in spring").
Violet's English-language history runs through the late 19th century and produced several notable Victorian-Edwardian bearers: British actress Violet Vanbrugh (1867–1942), American socialite Violet Cromwell, and many others. The name went through a long mid-20th-century quiet period before its dramatic 21st-century revival. Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck's daughter Violet (born 2005) and the broader Hollywood adoption of the name through the 2000s helped seed its return; the popular YouTube and Disney character Violet Parr from The Incredibles (2004) provided a generationally important fictional anchor.
Violet climbed from outside the US top 200 in 2005 to the top 30 girls' rank by 2018. The name's appeal is its layered femininity: classical-mythological, religiously coded, the inherent flower/color register, and the soft three-syllable phonetic profile. The name reads as both vintage (Edwardian/Downton Abbey) and modern (the 2000s revival has now produced its own associations). Common nicknames Vi, Lettie, and the rarer Vivi each carry distinct registers; the longer extensions Violetta (Italian) and Violette (French) are sometimes used. International forms include Violetta (Italian/Eastern European), Viola (Italian/Latin, also a Shakespearean character in Twelfth Night), and Violette (French).
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Violet
US Popularity History (1901–2025)
Annual US births named Violet by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2025 with 7,546 girls named Violet (girl rank #13 that year).
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 Violet 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 Violet the strongest states are Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wisconsin | #14 | 1,308 |
| 2 | Minnesota | #17 | 1,285 |
| 3 | Maine | #19 | 282 |
| 4 | Iowa | #20 | 701 |
| 5 | Oregon | #21 | 761 |
| 6 | Michigan | #22 | 1,872 |
| 7 | New Hampshire | #23 | 297 |
| 8 | Indiana | #23 | 1,319 |
| 9 | Washington | #25 | 1,391 |
| 10 | Rhode Island | #25 | 217 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mississippi | #143 | 194 |
| 2 | Alabama | #99 | 422 |
| 3 | Georgia | #78 | 1,066 |
| 4 | South Carolina | #71 | 511 |
| 5 | District of Columbia | #69 | 123 |
| 6 | Hawaii | #66 | 104 |
| 7 | North Carolina | #62 | 1,293 |
| 8 | Tennessee | #58 | 969 |
| 9 | Louisiana | #57 | 566 |
| 10 | Arkansas | #56 | 373 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Violet in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yolanda | Strong | Female | French |
Looking for names like Violet?
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 Violet to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Violet 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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