Beaulah
Feminine · “married”
One inserted letter and the name opens with the French word for handsome. Beulah is Hebrew and has nothing French about it at all, but spelled this way the first syllable is beau, and every reader who knows the word will see it there. The name is being given a nationality it does not have.
How old is the name Beaulah?
Beaulah first appears in US birth records in 1882 — 143 years ago. The typical Beaulah alive today was born around 1921, making them about 104 years old. About 300 people named Beaulah are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Beaulah most popular?
Beaulah peaked in 1900, reaching #576 nationally. See the whole 1900 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From Beulah to Beaulah
The story of Beaulah
What put the word into ordinary American use was a hymn. Beulah Land was written in the eighteen-seventies and became one of the most sung pieces in the revival meetings and camp meetings of the following decades, printed in gospel songbooks that reached further into rural America than any novel ever did. The song treats Beulah as a country the singer is standing in sight of, a place of rest just short of the end of the journey, and congregations sang it week after week until the word was completely familiar. Names travel by hymn far more often than histories of naming admit; a word set to a tune and sung by a whole room gets into households that no book would have entered.
Meaning
married
The Hebrew word is a participle meaning married or espoused, applied in scripture to a land rather than to a woman. Using it as a personal name is an English development and a comparatively recent one.
How the name formed
- Beulah
- Beaulah
Pronouncing Beaulah
BYOO-luh
Two syllables with the stress at the front. The inserted a is silent, so the spelling and the standard one sound identical, but it invites BOH-luh from readers meeting it cold.
Nicknames for Beaulah
Moderate
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1882
- Most girls named
- 192181 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #576reached in 1900
- Change vs 1961
- −37.5%5 in 1973, from 8
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Beaulahs among us
people named Beaulah are estimated to be alive in the US today
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
Questions parents actually ask
Fashion outlook
Beaulah sits outside the current charts, and that is its own kind of answer: naming cycles can only date the names they carried up. A name this rare has no decade stamped on it — it cannot go out of fashion, because it was never in.
Based on 146 years of naming cycles. How we read them
The trade-off
- The spelling gives the name a short form in Beau that the standard version does not have.
- The sound is soft and unusual without being difficult.
- It carries a specific and unusual scriptural sense rather than a generic one.
- Beulah is the standard spelling and the inserted a will be removed by other people constantly.
- The French opening the spelling creates points somewhere the name never came from.
- The generation that used it is now among the very oldest alive.
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What they receive
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Beaulah
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Beaulahs are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 300 people named Beaulah are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Beaulah in 2025?
- Beaulah is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Beaulah with classmates?
- Beaulah will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More B names
The most-given names starting with B, all years combined.
Barbara#968 · Betty#1113 · Brenda#1525 · Beverly#1016 · Brittany#928 · Bonnie#396 · Brianna#222 · Bertha#4546
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Beaulah? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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