Felicity: Meaning of Baby Name Felicity

About the Name Felicity

Felicity descends from the Latin felicitas meaning "happiness" or "good fortune." The name has classical Roman religious associations: Felicitas was a Roman goddess of good fortune and success, with a temple on the Palatine Hill in Rome. The name has additional Christian significance through Saint Felicity of Carthage (martyred 203 CE), one of the early Christian martyrs killed alongside Saint Perpetua.

The name's overwhelming modern American cultural anchor is the WB television series Felicity (1998–2002, starring Keri Russell as Felicity Porter, an idealistic young woman who follows her crush to college in New York City) — the show that anchored the name in late-1990s and early-2000s American popular culture.

Felicity's American climb is recent: the name climbed from outside the US top 500 in 1995 to the US top 300 girls' rank by 2014 and the top 300 since. Notable contemporary bearers include American actress Felicity Huffman (born 1962, the American actress of ABC's Desperate Housewives 2004–2012, Oscar nominee for Transamerica 2005); American actress Felicity Jones (born 1983, the British actress of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story 2016 and Theory of Everything 2014); and contemporary American activist Felicity Kennedy. The name's appeal is its layered Latin-Roman-Catholic-saint pedigree combined with four flowing syllables — the in-built happiness etymological register, the strong Felicity TV cultural anchor, and the elegant Latinate sophistication. Common nicknames Fee (the dominant short form, casual and warm), Lissy, Liss, and the rare City each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Felicity and Felicitee have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Felicidad (Spanish), Felicità (Italian, with accent), Félicité (French, with accents), and the original Latin felicitas.

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

Quick Facts About Felicity

1,414

French baby names in our dictionary

843

French female names

64

8-letter F-names in our dictionary

221

F-female names total

2000–2025

years of US SSA records (26 total)

15,628

total US births named Felicity (all years)

US Popularity History (2000–2025)

📉 Falling fast: Felicity dropped 89 places in the US girls ranking over the last 5 years (#384 in 2020 → #473 in 2025).

Annual US births named Felicity by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2017 with 938 girls named Felicity (girl rank #345 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #473 for girls (653 US births). That's 128 places below its 2017 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 Felicity 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 Felicity the strongest states are Alaska, Montana, North Dakota.

Strongest girls-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Alaska	#145	23
2	Montana	#171	19
3	North Dakota	#174	33
4	Maine	#189	18
5	Idaho	#204	93
6	New Mexico	#205	44
7	New Hampshire	#213	22
8	Utah	#247	173
9	Nebraska	#262	77
10	West Virginia	#262	35

Weakest girls-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	New York	#599	277
2	Georgia	#592	161
3	California	#578	583
4	New Jersey	#574	116
5	Alabama	#531	81
6	Texas	#509	599
7	Florida	#501	342
8	Louisiana	#495	95
9	Maryland	#485	114
10	South Carolina	#480	92

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

Looking for names like Felicity?

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 Felicity to Other Popular Names

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

Felicity vs Olivia 210,124 births since 2014

Felicity vs Emma 202,477 births since 2014

Felicity vs Sophia 169,709 births since 2014

Felicity vs Isabella 158,431 births since 2014

Felicity vs Ava 157,356 births since 2014

Felicity vs Charlotte 151,872 births since 2014

Felicity vs Mia 149,779 births since 2014

Felicity vs Amelia 142,728 births since 2014

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