Nona

About Nona

Nona has a Latin history connected with “ninth” and a separate Georgian history through Nonna. The Roman goddess Nona and chess champion Nona Gaprindashvili give the same compact spelling very different associations. Its two-syllable shape is simple, but its origins need more than one explanation.

The Latin name

Latin nonus means “ninth,” and Nona is its feminine form. The name was used in nineteenth-century England for a ninth-born child, following an older tradition of names connected with numbers.

In Roman mythology, Nona was associated with pregnancy and its nine-month span. She also became one of the three Fates, alongside Decima and Morta. Her role was to spin the thread of life, corresponding to the Greek Clotho.

The number connection and the mythological figure are consequently linked. They give Latin Nona both a straightforward numerical meaning and a place in Roman ideas about life and fate.

The Georgian name

Georgian Nona, written ნონა, is a form of Nonna. Nonna belongs to the family of Nonnos, whose deeper origin is uncertain, probably Egyptian or Semitic. This is a separate route from the Latin word for ninth.

Saint Nonna, the fourth-century mother of Gregory of Nazianzus, is an early bearer of that related form. The Georgian name therefore has an older Christian name family behind it, rather than needing to come from Roman numbering.

Nona Gaprindashvili

Born in Zugdidi, Georgia, she began playing chess as a child and later trained in Tbilisi. Her career made Nona especially recognizable in Georgian sporting history and in the wider international chess community.

Nona Gaprindashvili won the Women’s World Chess Championship in 1962 after defeating Elizaveta Bykova. She defended the title four times before losing it to Maia Chiburdanidze in 1978, giving her a long period at the highest level of women’s chess.

Her path to the world title included victory in the 1961 Candidates Tournament. Later, sharing first place at the 1977 Lone Pine tournament was an important result behind her award of the general Grandmaster title.

In 1978 she became the first woman awarded the FIDE Grandmaster title. This was the general Grandmaster title, distinct from the separate women’s title, and recognized her results in strong tournament play.

The name’s chess association belongs to this Georgian tradition. It adds a documented modern life to a spelling that also appears in ancient Roman mythology.

Form and American usage

Nona repeats the n consonant around its opening vowel, making the written form unusually balanced. Nonna is its close relative in the Georgian route, while Nonus is the masculine form in the Latin numerical family. The two connections belong to different histories.

In the United States, Nona’s largest annual total for girls was 360 in 1950, when it ranked #423. In 2025, twelve girls received it, ranking #8,723. Those figures group the exact spelling together rather than distinguishing its separate traditions.

How popular is Nona?

In 2025, Nona ranked #8,723 among girls in the United States, with 12 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for girls in 1880; its largest annual count was 360 in 1950. 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.