Martha

Martha: an Aramaic name meaning “lady”

Martha comes from Aramaic marta, meaning “the lady” or “the mistress,” the feminine counterpart of a word for “master.” Here the older meaning concerns a woman’s position in a household. The name is best known from the New Testament, where Martha is the sister of Mary and Lazarus of Bethany.

English usually says MAR-thuh, with two syllables and stress on the first. The th distinguishes that pronunciation from Marta, a related form used in several languages. Martha’s long history combines a biblical household with later associations in American public life and dance.

Martha of Bethany

The biblical Martha belongs to the family of Lazarus, whom Jesus restores to life in the Gospel of John. Her place in that narrative connects the name with one of the best-known accounts of Jesus’s miracles. Mary of Bethany is her sister, making the two names recognizable as a pair within the same household.

Martha entered English naming use after the Protestant Reformation. It subsequently became established well beyond its biblical setting, appearing in family histories and public life across several centuries.

Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington, supplies an especially familiar American historical bearer. That association reaches back to the beginning of the United States presidency and precedes the name’s later peaks in national birth records.

Martha Graham and modern dance

The dancer and choreographer Martha Graham founded her company and school in 1926, working from a small studio in Carnegie Hall in New York. Her approach developed around fundamental movements of contraction and release, creating a distinctive vocabulary for expressing emotion through the body.

Her choreography drew on sources including Greek mythology, American history, and modern art. She collaborated with artists in other fields, among them sculptor Isamu Noguchi and composer Aaron Copland. Those partnerships joined movement with music, stage design, and visual form.

Graham received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 and was among the first recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 1985. Her company and school carry her full name, preserving Martha as a familiar name within the history and continuing practice of modern dance.

Pronunciation and related forms

English MAR-thuh begins with the same stressed syllable as the opening of “market,” followed by an unstressed ending. The th is the sound in “think.” German and Spanish pronunciations instead use a t sound, closer to MAR-tah.

Marta makes that t-based form visible in the spelling. Martha keeps the familiar English th, while retaining a compact two-syllable rhythm. The full name is brief enough to remain the everyday form without shortening.

Popularity in the United States

Martha ranked fourteenth among American girls in 1882. Its largest annual count came much later, in 1947, with 10,651 births. Those different peaks show a name with substantial use across several generations.

It ranked 772 in 2015, 767 in 2020, and 713 in 2025. Martha is much less frequent than at its earlier heights, but its recent movement has been upward. Its biblical history and its distinctive historical and artistic bearers remain readily recognizable.

How popular is Martha?

In 2025, Martha ranked #713 among girls in the United States, with 393 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for girls in 1880; its largest annual count was 10,651 in 1947. 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.