Ada
- Pronunciation
- [A-da]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Ibo Of Nigeria Name For Firstborn Females.
- Origin
- African
About the Name Ada
Ada descends from the medieval Germanic Adelheid (see entry on Adelaide), with Ada being a short form. The Germanic root adal means "noble." An alternative reading derives Ada from the Hebrew 'adah meaning "adornment" — appearing in Genesis 4:19 as the name of the first wife of Lamech, descendant of Cain.
The name's most consequential historical bearer is British mathematician Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, 1815–1852, daughter of Lord Byron), who collaborated with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. Her 1843 algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers is widely considered the first computer program, making her one of the foundational figures in computer-science history. The Ada programming language (developed 1980 by the US Department of Defense) was named in her honor.
Ada was rare in pre-modern American naming, becoming common only through 19th- and early-20th-century English-speaking American naming. Ada held a US top-100 girls' rank from 1880 through 1925 — over four decades of consistent late-Victorian and Edwardian popularity. After a long mid-20th-century quiet period, the name has been climbing dramatically through the 2010s and 2020s as part of the broader vintage-revival wave alongside Hazel and Iris. Ada climbed from outside the US top 500 in 2000 to the US top 100 girls' rank by 2018 and the top 75 by 2022. The name's appeal is its compact classical register combined with two short syllables — the in-built Ada-Lovelace tech-history pedigree adds a subtle modern register that distinguishes Ada from purely vintage choices. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — Adi, Ady, and the rare Adda each occasionally appear; the longer formal forms Adelaide and Adeline are sometimes used as Ada's official-document version. International forms include Ada (essentially identical across European languages), the related Italian Adda, and the broader Adelaide/Adel family.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Ada
US Popularity History (1880–2025)
Annual US births named Ada by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2022 with 1,656 girls named Ada (girl rank #181 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #219 for girls (1,401 US births). That's 38 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 Ada 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 Ada the strongest states are Minnesota, North Dakota, District of Columbia.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Minnesota | #119 | 422 |
| 2 | North Dakota | #124 | 49 |
| 3 | District of Columbia | #130 | 65 |
| 4 | Iowa | #134 | 221 |
| 5 | Maine | #137 | 83 |
| 6 | Wisconsin | #138 | 355 |
| 7 | South Dakota | #144 | 73 |
| 8 | Montana | #151 | 59 |
| 9 | Missouri | #152 | 380 |
| 10 | New Hampshire | #155 | 53 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oklahoma | #462 | 83 |
| 2 | New Jersey | #430 | 185 |
| 3 | Florida | #426 | 414 |
| 4 | Arizona | #419 | 161 |
| 5 | Texas | #405 | 774 |
| 6 | Nevada | #373 | 54 |
| 7 | California | #312 | 1,059 |
| 8 | Connecticut | #306 | 94 |
| 9 | New Mexico | #304 | 22 |
| 10 | Idaho | #280 | 57 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Ada in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Famous People Named Ada
2 notable figures from history and culture who share the name Ada.
- Ada Cambridge was a prolific English-born Australian writer.
- Ada Yonath is an Israeli scientist, who is known for her pioneering work on the structure and function of ribosome.
Looking for names like Ada?
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 Ada to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Ada 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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