Gilda
Fewer than 30 women in Poland carry it, and no girl has been named Gilda so far this century. Germanic at root, from a word for sacrifice or tribute.
Gilda Pronunciation
Gilda is pronounced GEEL-dah (/ˈgilda/).
What Gilda means
Where Gilda comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Gilda grows from a Germanic root, gild, meaning a sacrifice or a tribute paid. The old word named an offering, something given up so that a debt or a bond could hold. The short meaning stays close to that root: sacrifice, tribute. In Polish the sense lands as ofiara.
The name became Italian mostly through opera. In Verdi's Rigoletto (1851), Gilda is the jester's daughter who gives her own life for the man she loves. Audiences have wept over that ending for more than a century. Later, Rita Hayworth played a very different Gilda in the 1946 film, and the name picked up glamour it never had before.
So one small name holds two Italian faces. One dies for love. One dances in a nightclub. Both trace back to a blunt Germanic idea about giving something away. Read a Polish class register today and Gilda looks foreign, a little theatrical, with no diminutive to soften it. The name arrives whole, meaning tribute.
How many people are named Gilda
1 in 777374 women in Poland is named Gilda. 29 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #7646 among female names.
Gilda as a middle name
Gilda is a first name for 29 women in Poland and a middle name for another 13, a 69/31 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 2074th, between Georgette (13) and Giuseppina (13).
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#2072 Geneviève13
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#2073 Georgette13
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#2074 Gilda13
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#2075 Giuseppina13
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#2076 Gizem13