Ivah
Feminine · “yew”
The yew is the tree English churchyards are planted with, the wood English longbows were cut from, and the source of a small family of names that reached England from the continent: Ivo, Ives, Yves, Ivon, Iva. Ivah is the American spelling of the shortest of them.
How old is the name Ivah?
Ivah was already in use when US birth records began in 1880 — it is at least 145 years old. The typical Ivah alive today was born around 1913, making them about 112 years old. About 100 people named Ivah are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Ivah most popular?
Ivah peaked in 1882, reaching #560 nationally. Today it ranks #10917, 10,357 places below that high. See the whole 1882 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From Ivo to Ivah
The story of Ivah
Ivo was a Breton and Norman name, carried into England after the Conquest and into English surnames as Ives and Ivison. The yew behind it was a practical tree as much as a sacred one: it made the best bow-staves in Europe, and English demand stripped whole regions of it. The feminine Iva is later and thinner in the record, and the American spelling with an h is later still, part of a nineteenth-century habit of finishing short names with a silent letter. What the name mostly carries now is scarcity. Very few people alive hold it, nearly all of them born a long time ago, which makes it one of the small number of American names visibly close to the end of their run.
Meaningscholars disagree
yew
The usual reading takes Iva as a feminine of Ivo, from a Germanic word for the yew tree, which also gave Yves and the English surname Ives. A second account treats Iva as a short form of names beginning with Iv- or as a variant of Ida. Ivah is also a place name in the Book of Kings, and some nineteenth-century American families took it from there rather than from either.
How the name formed
- Ivo
- Iva
- Ivah
Related forms: Yves · Iva · Iva
Pronouncing Ivah
EYE-vuh
Two syllables, stress on the first, with a long i. The h is silent. In Czech and Croatian the same spelling minus the h is said EE-vah, with a short first vowel, which is a different sound entirely.
Nicknames for Ivah
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
- 1880
- Most girls named
- 189528 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #560reached in 1882
- Change vs 2024
- −27.3%8 in 2025, from 11
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.
Ivah in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Yves in French — related form
- Iva in Czech — same name
- Iva in Croatian — same name
Ivahs among us
people named Ivah are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 girl in 200,908 born in 2025 was named Ivah
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Spellings of Ivah
- #10917
- Ivah on the 2025 chart
- #835
- counting every spelling
The SSA counts spellings, not names. Ivah went to 8 girls in 2025, but Iva is the same name said out loud. Together the 2 spellings went to 125, which makes it the 835th most-given girls’ name of the year — 10,082 places above the chart.
- Iva117
- Ivah8
About 1 girl in 12,858 born in 2025 was given one of these spellings — against 1 in 200,908 for Ivah 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
Fashion outlook
Ivah 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
Ivah beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Ivah in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US girls given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- Four letters and two syllables, with nothing in it to explain.
- A documented masculine counterpart still in wide use in French.
- It is genuinely rare, in the sense that a child will almost certainly never meet another.
- Very few people carry it now and almost all of them are old, so it reads as a name from another century.
- The h is silent and will be dropped by nearly everyone who writes it.
- It is heard as Eva and as Ava, both of which are far commoner.
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Ivah
Feminine · #10917 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Ivahs are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 100 people named Ivah are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How do you spell Ivah?
- Ivah is one of 2 recorded spellings. Iva is the more common one — 117 births in 2025 against 8 for Ivah.
- How popular is the name Ivah in 2025?
- Ivah ranks #10917 among US girl names in 2025, with 8 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Ivah?
- About 1 in every 200,908 US girls born in 2025 was named Ivah — 8 in all.
- Will my child share the name Ivah with classmates?
- Ivah will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Ivah
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Edythe#10917 · Tessie#10917 · Drusilla#10917 · Eugenie#10917 · Karri#10917 · Claribel#10917 · Adell#10917 · Myrtle#10917
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Ivah? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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