Dorinda
Feminine · “gift”
The -inda ending was invented on the stage. Restoration playwrights and the poets around them needed names that sounded classical without being anybody's, and they built them: Clarinda, Belinda, Dorinda, Florinda. All four appear in seventeenth and eighteenth-century plays and poems, and all four escaped into ordinary use.
How old is the name Dorinda?
Dorinda first appears in US birth records in 1892 — 133 years ago. The typical Dorinda alive today was born around 1960, making them about 65 years old. About 3,900 people named Dorinda are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Dorinda most popular?
Dorinda peaked in 1944, reaching #605 nationally. See the whole 1944 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From Dora to Dorinda
The story of Dorinda
The Restoration stage needed names for pastoral and comic characters that would sound elevated and belong to nobody, and it manufactured them in quantity — the -inda names are the clearest set. Dorinda appears in Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem and in a good deal of eighteenth-century verse. Names made this way tend to filter into real use within a generation or two, which is what happened: by the nineteenth century Dorinda and Belinda were being given to actual children whose parents had read the plays or not.
Meaningscholars disagree
gift
If the front is Dora, from Greek doron, a gift, the name inherits that at one remove. The -inda ending has no meaning at all — it was constructed by analogy with Spanish and Italian names ending that way, chosen for its sound. So the name is half a real Greek word and half an invented suffix, which is the ordinary structure of a coined literary name and not a defect in it.
How the name formed
- Dora
- Dorinda
Related forms: Dorinda · Dorinda
Pronouncing Dorinda
dor-IN-duh
dor-IN-duh, three syllables, stress in the middle. The -inda ending pulls the stress onto itself, which is what it was designed to do — it gives a short base a rhythm English otherwise struggles to produce.
Nicknames for Dorinda
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
- 1892
- Most girls named
- 1956197 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #605reached in 1944
- Change vs 2011
- +33.3%8 in 2015, from 6
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.
Dorinda in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Dorinda in Spanish — same name
- Dorinda in Italian — same name
Dorindas among us
people named Dorinda 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
Dorinda 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 literary history is documented and unusually specific about how the name was made.
- Dori and Rinda are both usable short forms and they sound quite different.
- Three syllables with a clear middle stress, which balances a short surname.
- Belinda and Melinda are far better known and this will be heard as one of them.
- The -inda ending places the name in a distinctly literary and distinctly old register.
- It belongs to an earlier American period and has not returned.
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Dorinda
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Dorindas are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 3,900 people named Dorinda are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Dorinda in 2025?
- Dorinda is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Dorinda with classmates?
- Dorinda will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More D names
The most-given names starting with D, all years combined.
Dorothy#421 · Donna#1962 · Deborah#862 · Debra#4460 · Diane#2607 · Doris#2895 · Denise#1673 · Danielle#549
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Dorinda? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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