Melissa
Masculine · “bee”
Melissa is given to girls far more often — 760,128 girls against 2,495 boys since 1880. See Melissa as a girl name
A sixteenth-century Italian epic put this name back into use. Melissa is the good sorceress in Orlando Furioso — the one who unpicks the enchantments and tells people the truth about themselves — and the poem was read across Europe for three hundred years, which is why a Greek common noun became an English name.
How old is the name Melissa?
Melissa first appears in US birth records in 1956 — 69 years ago. The typical Melissa alive today was born around 1979, making them about 46 years old. About 2,300 people named Melissa are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Melissa most popular?
Melissa peaked in 1980, reaching #747 nationally. See the whole 1980 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From melissa to Melissa
The story of Melissa
Very few Greek common nouns became English names. Most of what English took from Greek came through the church or through mythology, arriving as the names of people; a word for an insect is a different kind of borrowing, and it needed a reason. Ariosto supplied one. His Melissa is a benign magician who lives in Merlin's cave, and the poem's enormous popularity carried the name into Italian, French and English use in the sixteenth century. It has been in the record continuously since, and it reached the very top of the American lists four hundred years after the poem was printed.
Meaning
bee
The Greek melissa is the ordinary word for a honeybee, from the word for honey. It is a common noun used as a name, which is rarer than it sounds.
How the name formed
- melissa
- Melissa
Related forms: Melissa · Melisa · Melissa
Pronouncing Melissa
muh-LISS-uh
Three syllables with the weight in the middle. Said essentially the same way in English, Italian and modern Greek.
Nicknames for Melissa
High
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
- 1956
- Most boys named
- 1980138 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #747reached in 1980
- Change vs 2008
- −28.6%5 in 2015, 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.
Melissa in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Melissa in Italian — same name
- Melisa in Spanish — spelling variant
- Melissa in Greek — transliteration
Melissas among us
people named Melissa 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
Melissa 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 is spelled and said nearly identically across English, Italian, Spanish and Greek.
- The meaning is concrete, pleasant and among the shortest any name carries.
- It carries four established short forms with quite different characters.
- It has an unbroken run in American records from the first year they were kept.
- It is heavily generation-marked to the nineteen-seventies and eighties.
- Melisa and Mellissa are both in the record and will be written for you.
- The spelling is recorded for a small number of boys, though it reads overwhelmingly as a girl's name.
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Melissa
Masculine
Frequently asked
- How many Melissas are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 2,300 people named Melissa are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Melissa in 2025?
- Melissa is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 boy names.
- Will my child share the name Melissa with classmates?
- Melissa will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More M names
The most-given names starting with M, all years combined.
Michael#21 · Matthew#32 · Mark#244 · Mason#39 · Martin#335 · Marvin#699 · Melvin#958 · Marcus#258
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Melissa? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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