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Laila

A Hebrew name meaning "night". Still rare in Poland, the kind most people never come across, but it's given a little more each year: 30 newborn girls last year, and always girls.

Laila Pronunciation

Laila is pronounced lah-EE-lah (/laˈila/).

Alive in 2025
656
Newborns 2025
30
National rank
#1158

What Laila means

Where Laila comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.

Laila comes from Hebrew, where laila means night. The word is old and plain, the same one that surfaces in the account of creation, when God called the darkness Night. Arabic carried the sound eastward, and there it became the woman at the center of a great love story. Nizami Ganjavi wrote her down in the twelfth century: Layla, beloved of Qays, who lost his reason for her and so earned the name Majnun. Her name meant night, and his devotion made it known across the Islamic world.

Scandinavia took the name by another road. A Norwegian novel by Jens Andreas Friis, published in 1881, gave its heroine the name Laila, and later films spread it through Norway and among the Sami. By the twentieth century it read as a Nordic name as readily as an eastern one.

So a Polish class register might hold a Laila between a Zofia and a Lena. The meaning stays fixed under every spelling. Night, or in Polish, noc.

How many people are named Laila

1 in 34366 women in Poland is named Laila. 656 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #1158 among female names.

People with the name Laila 2019 → 2025
656 +242 since 2019
2020 431 +17
2021 470 +39
2022 514 +44
2023 568 +54
2024 616 +48
2025 656 +40

Laila's popularity over time

30 girls were given the name in 2025, ranking #439 among newborns. It is making a comeback after a low in 2004.

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30 newborns with the name Laila in 2025
national rank #439 that year

Where Laila is most popular

Laila is most popular in Opole, 94% above the national average (6 girls born 2019–2025), followed by Lower Silesian (+90%) and West Pomeranian (+77%). It is least common in Kuyavian-Pomeranian and Lublin, 73% and 71% below average respectively.

More common than average Less common than average

Laila as a middle name

Laila is a first name for 656 women in Poland and a middle name for another 120, an 85/15 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 598th, between Hieronima (121) and Suzanne (120).

As a first name
656
As a middle name
120
first name 85% middle name 15%
Middle-name ranking women

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Next in ranking → Steven #1159