Clorinda
Feminine · “Pale green”
Clorinda and Clarinda are not the same name, though they look like two spellings of one. Clarinda is built on the Latin word for bright. Clorinda was invented by an Italian poet for a warrior who fights in black armor, and its first syllable is a different word in a different language.
How old is the name Clorinda?
Clorinda first appears in US birth records in 1887 — 138 years ago. The typical Clorinda alive today was born around 1941, making them about 84 years old. About 600 people named Clorinda are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Clorinda most popular?
Clorinda peaked in 1911, reaching #1071 nationally. See the whole 1911 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From chloros to Clorinda
The story of Clorinda
Torquato Tasso invented Clorinda for his epic on the First Crusade, published towards the end of the sixteenth century. She is a Muslim warrior raised as a fighter, she meets the Christian knight Tancredi in combat at night without either knowing who the other is, and he kills her; she asks for baptism as she dies and he gives it to her, and then discovers whom he has killed. It is the most famous scene in the poem and one of the most famous in Italian literature. Monteverdi set it as a short dramatic work for three voices in the next century, and painters returned to it for two hundred years. English took the name off the page, as it took Clarinda and Belinda and Dorinda, and by the nineteenth century American families were using it without any idea of where it came from.
Meaningscholars disagree
Pale green, with an invented ending
The most likely source of the first element is Greek chloros, the pale yellow-green of new leaves, the word behind chlorine and chlorophyll. That reading is a scholarly guess rather than a statement by the poet, who did not explain himself. The -inda ending is decoration with no sense in any language. What can be said with confidence is that this name and Clarinda have separate origins and only converged in appearance.
How the name formed
- chloros
- Clorinda
Related forms: Clorinda · Clorinda · Clorinda
Pronouncing Clorinda
klo-RIN-duh
Three syllables with the stress in the middle. The first vowel is a short o in English and a fuller one in Italian and Spanish. In practice the name is very often heard as Clarinda, because the two differ only in an unstressed vowel.
Nicknames for Clorinda
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
- 1887
- Most girls named
- 192333 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #1071reached in 1911
- Change vs 1989
- −28.6%5 in 1992, from 7
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.
Clorinda in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Clorinda in Italian — same name
- Clorinda in Spanish — same name
- Clorinda in Portuguese — same name
Clorindas among us
people named Clorinda 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
Clorinda 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
- It comes with a real literary character behind it, and a scene that has been painted and set to music for four centuries.
- The name works unchanged in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, which few English-made names of this shape manage.
- Clori is an unusual short form that connects the name to Chloe without being it.
- Clarinda is the near neighbor and the two are confused constantly, in speech and on paper.
- The literary source is a death scene, which some parents will want to know and others will wish they had not.
- The -inda ending places the name in the nineteenth century for most American ears.
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Clorinda
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Clorindas are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 600 people named Clorinda are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Clorinda in 2025?
- Clorinda is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Clorinda with classmates?
- Clorinda will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More C names
The most-given names starting with C, all years combined.
Carol#2239 · Cynthia#1013 · Catherine#313 · Christine#1272 · Carolyn#1222 · Christina#770 · Charlotte#2 · Cheryl#4352
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Clorinda? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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