Chiquita
Feminine · “little girl”
Chiquita is overwhelmingly a girls’ name — 6,219 girls against 6 boys since 1880.
Chiquita is Spanish for a little girl, and it is also one of the most heavily advertised words in American grocery history. Chico means small; chica is a girl; chiquita is the affectionate diminutive of that, the ordinary word a Spanish-speaking family would use for a daughter. Then a fruit company took it.
How old is the name Chiquita?
Chiquita first appears in US birth records in 1917 — 108 years ago. The typical Chiquita alive today was born around 1979, making them about 46 years old. About 5,800 people named Chiquita are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Chiquita most popular?
Chiquita peaked in 1985, reaching #532 nationally. See the whole 1985 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From chico to Chiquita
The story of Chiquita
In the nineteen-forties a fruit company created an advertising character called Chiquita Banana with a song explaining how to store the fruit, and the jingle was played so relentlessly on American radio that it became one of the best-known pieces of music in the country. The company took the name for itself soon after. That is why a Spanish endearment is a trademark in the United States and simply a word everywhere else, and it is the single largest thing to know before choosing the name here.
Meaning
little girl
Spanish chico means small, chica is its feminine and the ordinary word for a girl, and the -ita ending makes it smaller and fonder still. The word is completely transparent to any Spanish speaker and is used constantly in speech as an endearment rather than as a name. The derivation of chico itself is argued — a Latin word for a trifle is the usual proposal — but the sense of the whole is not in any doubt.
How the name formed
- chico
- chica
- chiquita
- Chiquita
Related forms: Chiquita
Pronouncing Chiquita
chih-KEE-tah
chih-KEE-tah, three syllables, stress in the middle, the qu said as a plain k in the Spanish way. English speakers manage this one well because the advertising taught it, which is a rare case of a jingle doing a name a favor.
Nicknames for Chiquita
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
- 1917
- Most girls named
- 1985373 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #532reached in 1985
- Change vs 2002
- −33.3%6 in 2005, from 9
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.
Chiquita in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Chiquita in Spanish — same name
Chiquitas among us
people named Chiquita 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
Chiquita 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 meaning is plain, warm and immediately understood by any Spanish speaker.
- The pronunciation is already familiar to Americans, which most Spanish names are not.
- Chiqui and Kita are both usable short forms in two different registers.
- In the United States the word is a fruit brand before it is anything else, and that association is enormous and permanent.
- In Spanish it is an endearment rather than a name, so Spanish speakers may hear it as a nickname on a document.
- It is recorded for boys as well, though rarely, so on a form it will occasionally be guessed wrong.
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What they receive
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Chiquita
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Chiquitas are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 5,800 people named Chiquita are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Chiquita in 2025?
- Chiquita is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Chiquita with classmates?
- Chiquita will almost certainly be the only one in school.
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Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Chiquita? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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