Edna

Edna: a Hebrew delight name with a literary history

Edna means “pleasure” or “delight” in Hebrew. The two-syllable pronunciation, ED-nuh, gives it a compact shape, while its history reaches from the Book of Tobit to nineteenth-century fiction and modern American poetry. In Ireland and Scotland, Edna has also served as an English form of the separate name Eithne.

Hebrew roots and the Eithne connection

The Hebrew name is related to a root meaning to delight. In the Book of Tobit, Edna is the wife of Raguel. This gives the name a religious history well before the period in which it became a popular English-speaking choice.

The Irish and Scottish use has a different origin: Edna can represent Eithne in English. Eithne is possibly connected with an Old Irish word meaning kernel or grain. That interpretation belongs to Eithne’s history, alongside Edna’s better-known Hebrew pleasure meaning.

Eden belongs to the Hebrew delight family, while Eithne connects Edna to a separate group of Irish forms, including Ena and Enya. The same written Edna can therefore take its place in more than one naming tradition.

A nineteenth-century fictional heroine

Edna’s English-speaking popularity grew in the second half of the nineteenth century. Augusta Jane Evans used it for the heroine of St. Elmo, published in 1866, and the successful novel helped make the name familiar to readers.

That literary appearance came before Edna’s strongest American chart years around the turn of the century. The name’s history consequently includes both an older biblical background and a particular nineteenth-century moment when fiction helped bring it into wider everyday use.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay gives the name another substantial literary connection. Her work brought together traditional poetic forms and the concerns of a modern public life. Her first book, Renascence and Other Poems, appeared in 1917 and helped establish her reputation among the writers and artists associated with Greenwich Village.

Millay received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, A Few Figs from Thistles, and eight sonnets. Her public identity kept the full Edna visible in a literary career quite different from the nineteenth-century fictional heroine who had helped popularize it.

Pronunciation and American popularity

English Edna stresses the first syllable. Its opening vowel is the one in bed, followed by a light final uh sound. The d and n meet across the syllable boundary, giving the short spelling its distinctive center.

Edna reached its best U.S. girl-name rank of 11 in 1899. Its largest annual count followed in 1918, with 8,698 births. It ranked 2,300 in 2015, 2,085 in 2020, and 2,463 in 2025, making it much rarer now than during its late-Victorian and early twentieth-century prominence.

How popular is Edna?

In 2025, Edna ranked #2,463 among girls in the United States, with 72 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for girls in 1880; its largest annual count was 8,698 in 1918. Rankings count each spelling separately. They describe national use, so local familiarity can differ. The popularity chart shows whether the name has remained common, returned after a quieter period, or risen recently.