Emmah
Feminine · “whole”
Emmah is Emma with a silent h borrowed from another tradition. In Sarah, Hannah, Leah and Deborah that final h is doing real work — it stands for a Hebrew letter. Emma has no Hebrew in it at all. It is Germanic, a short form clipped off longer names built on ermin, meaning whole or universal. The h is a decision about the page, not about the name.
How old is the name Emmah?
Emmah first appears in US birth records in 1998 — 27 years ago. The typical Emmah alive today was born around 2010, making them about 15 years old. About 900 people named Emmah are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Emmah most popular?
Emmah peaked in 2008, reaching #2441 nationally. Today it ranks #14942, 12,501 places below that high. See the whole 2008 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From Irmin to Emmah
The story of Emmah
Emma of Normandy brought the name to England in the eleventh century, married two kings of England in succession, and outlived most of the men who ruled around her; her name survived the Norman conquest for the ordinary reason that the conquerors were her relatives. It stayed in medieval English use, thinned out, and was put back into wide circulation when Jane Austen gave a novel the name in the early nineteenth century. The final h belongs to a much later and much more local habit: American spelling has long added a silent h to names ending in a vowel, on the model of the Hebrew names that legitimately carry one. Aaliyah, Nevaeh and Emmah all do it. The letter is silent in every case and consistent in none.
Meaning
whole; universal
Emma began as a short form rather than a name, standing in for compound Germanic names whose first element was ermin or irmin — a word meaning whole, entire or universal, and connected to a god-name in older Germanic religion. Ermintrude and Irmengard are among the long forms it replaced. The clipping happened early enough that Emma was already a full name in its own right long before English speakers met it, and the added h has no bearing on any of this.
How the name formed
- Irmin
- Emma
- Emmah
Related forms: Irmgard · Emmi · Emma
Pronouncing Emmah
EM-uh
EM-uh, two syllables, stress at the front. The h is silent and does not lengthen the final vowel. A reader who tries to sound it produces something the name has never been in any language.
Nicknames for Emmah
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
- 1998
- Most girls named
- 200878 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #2441reached in 2008
- Change vs 2024
- −37.5%5 in 2025, 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.
Emmah in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Irmgard in German — related form
- Emmi in Finnish — related form
- Emma in French — same name
Strongest US states over the last decade: Texas, California.
Emmahs among us
people named Emmah are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 girl in 321,453 born in 2025 was named Emmah
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Spellings of Emmah
- #14942
- Emmah on the 2025 chart
- #5
- counting every spelling
The SSA counts spellings, not names. Emmah went to 5 girls in 2025, but Emma and Ema are the same name said out loud. Together the 3 spellings went to 12,923, which makes it the 5th most-given girls’ name of the year — 14,937 places above the chart.
About 1 girl in 124 born in 2025 was given one of these spellings — against 1 in 321,453 for Emmah 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 Beatris test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Emmah's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Beatris climbed just as high around 1980, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Beatris's path sketches the road Emmah is walking now.
Emmah 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
Emmah beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Emmah in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US girls given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- The name underneath is one of the most secure in Europe, with a thousand years of unbroken use in England alone.
- Two syllables, front-stressed, and effectively impossible to mispronounce in any accent.
- The h makes the written name distinct while leaving the spoken one exactly as it always was.
- Because the base name is so familiar, the h reads as an error rather than a variant, and it will be dropped in databases and on mail.
- The silent h belongs to Hebrew names and this one is Germanic, so anyone who knows why Hannah has an h will notice that Emma should not.
- It shares its entire sound with a name a great many children already carry, so the distinction lives only on paper and never in a room.
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What they receive
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Emmah
Feminine · #14942 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Emmahs are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 900 people named Emmah are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How do you spell Emmah?
- Emmah is one of 3 recorded spellings. Emma is the more common one — 12,754 births in 2025 against 5 for Emmah.
- How popular is the name Emmah in 2025?
- Emmah ranks #14942 among US girl names in 2025, with 5 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Emmah?
- About 1 in every 321,453 US girls born in 2025 was named Emmah — 5 in all.
- Will my child share the name Emmah with classmates?
- Emmah will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Emmah
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 Emmah? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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