Alba
From the Latin for "white" or "dawn", a name Italian and Spanish speakers know better than Poles do. Fewer than 150 women here carry it, and almost none have been born in recent years, so meeting one stays memorable.
Alba Pronunciation
Alba is pronounced AHL-bah (/ˈalba/).
What Alba means
Where Alba comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Alba comes from Latin. The adjective albus, alba meant white, the plain white of chalk and of unpainted wool. Romans used it for a colour, not for a time of day.
In Spanish and Italian the same short word, alba, names the dawn, the first pale light before sunrise. The link is the colour. White turned into the white of daybreak, so a name that began as a shade also came to mean morning. This is why the meaning sits in two places at once, white and dawn, with the second sense arriving later than the first.
Alba keeps close to its Spanish and Italian homes, and it travels with no diminutive of its own. On a Polish class register it reads as plainly foreign, two syllables, easy to say. What a teacher reading the roll pronounces is still the Latin word for white.
When Alba celebrates name day
Alba appears 1 time in the Polish name day calendar, never as a main name. The first of these dates is 17 January.
Rarer dates. Only the most complete calendars add this name on these days. Most skip them, so hardly anyone celebrates then.
How many people are named Alba
1 in 156554 women in Poland is named Alba. 144 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #2710 among female names.
Alba's popularity over time
Fewer than 2 girls were given the name in 2025. It has been stable for a decade.
Alba as a middle name
Alba is a first name for 144 women in Poland and a middle name for another 36, an 80/20 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1150th, between Sun (37) and Anabel (36).
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#1148 Sultan37
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#1149 Sun37
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#1150 Alba36
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#1151 Anabel36
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#1152 Antonella36