Emaleigh
Feminine · “a clearing in the woods”
Emaleigh is built the way a great many American names have been built in recent decades: take a familiar name and end it in -leigh. The element is real and very old. Leah is the Old English word for a clearing in woodland, and it stands at the end of thousands of English place names and the surnames taken from them. Here it does the work a plain -ly would do, with three extra letters.
How old is the name Emaleigh?
Emaleigh first appears in US birth records in 1993 — 32 years ago. The typical Emaleigh alive today was born around 2009, making them about 16 years old. About 1,100 people named Emaleigh are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Emaleigh most popular?
Emaleigh peaked in 2006, reaching #2538 nationally. Today it ranks #14942, 12,404 places below that high. See the whole 2006 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
Origin, sound and short forms
The story of Emaleigh
Leah was one of the busiest words in Old English, because clearing woodland was one of the busiest activities in it. Every settlement cut out of forest took the word, which is why the -ley and -leigh endings are everywhere on an English map. The surnames followed the places, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the surname Leigh became a given name for girls and boys both. From there it did something surnames rarely do: it detached and became a suffix, available to attach to anything. Kayleigh, Ryleigh, Ashleigh and Emaleigh all come out of that move, which is barely a generation old as a naming habit and has produced hundreds of spellings. The word at the end of them is a thousand years older than the practice.
Meaning
a clearing in the woods
The -leigh half is entirely clear: Old English leah, a clearing or a meadow, the same element in Ashley, Bradley, Hadley and half the villages of England. The front is Emma or Emily depending on which name a household started from, and those two have separate origins — one Germanic, one Roman. So the name is a compound rather than a single inherited word, and the honest reading is the ending's, because the ending is the part with an undisputed meaning.
Pronouncing Emaleigh
EM-uh-lee
Three syllables with the stress at the front: EM-uh-lee, the same sound as Emily. The -leigh spelling adds no sound at all; it replaces the -ly letter for letter and leaves the mouth alone.
Nicknames for Emaleigh
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
- 1993
- Most girls named
- 200672 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #2538reached in 2006
- Change vs 2024
- −16.7%5 in 2025, 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.
Emaleigh in other languages
Strongest US states over the last decade: Texas.
Emaleighs among us
people named Emaleigh are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 girl in 321,453 born in 2025 was named Emaleigh
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Spellings of Emaleigh
- #14942
- Emaleigh on the 2025 chart
- #932
- counting every spelling
The SSA counts spellings, not names. Emaleigh went to 5 girls in 2025, but Emmaleigh is the same name said out loud. Together the 2 spellings went to 28, which makes it the 932nd most-given girls’ name of the year — 14,010 places above the chart.
- Emmaleigh23
- Emaleigh5
About 1 girl in 57,402 born in 2025 was given one of these spellings — against 1 in 321,453 for Emaleigh itself.
Spellings are grouped by a fixed rule that folds interchangeable English spellings of one sound (ck/k, ph/f, x/ks, a non-initial y for i) and keeps vowels apart, so Sean and Shawn stay separate names. It errs towards splitting: a family here is never larger than the truth. SSA national data, 2025. Method
Is it right for you
What happens to a name after it peaks
The Kammie test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Emaleigh's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Kammie climbed just as high around 1965, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Kammie's path sketches the road Emaleigh is walking now.
Emaleigh sits in the calm middle of the cycle — neither chasing a wave nor sliding off one. Middle-of-the-cycle names age slowly and predictably.
A scored estimate from 146 years of naming cycles — not a prophecy. Great names outlive statistics. How this is scored
Emaleigh beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Emaleigh in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US girls given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- The sound is completely familiar even though the spelling is not, so it is never mispronounced.
- The -leigh ending has a real English word behind it rather than being purely decorative.
- Em, Emma and Leigh are all available inside it without any invention.
- It sounds exactly like Emily, so in speech the two names are the same and the spelling is the only difference there is.
- Eight letters doing the work of six means a lifetime of spelling it out, and it will still come back as Emily, Emmalee or Emaleah.
- The -leigh ending dates the name to a recent and fairly narrow stretch of American naming, in a way that Emily itself does not.
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Emaleigh
Feminine · #14942 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Emaleighs are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 1,100 people named Emaleigh are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How do you spell Emaleigh?
- Emaleigh is one of 2 recorded spellings. Emmaleigh is the more common one — 23 births in 2025 against 5 for Emaleigh.
- How popular is the name Emaleigh in 2025?
- Emaleigh ranks #14942 among US girl names in 2025, with 5 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Emaleigh?
- About 1 in every 321,453 US girls born in 2025 was named Emaleigh — 5 in all.
- Will my child share the name Emaleigh with classmates?
- Emaleigh will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Emaleigh
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Hester#14942 · Lyda#14942 · Zula#14942 · Zona#14942 · Ula#14942 · Belva#14942 · Lucetta#14942 · Leala#14942
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Emaleigh? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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