Zabrina
Feminine · “the river Severn”
Zabrina is Sabrina with a z, and Sabrina is a river. The Latin name of the Severn is Sabrina, the river is the longest in Britain, and the legend attached to it has a girl drowned in the water and turned into its spirit, which is the sort of story rivers attract and which a Roman geographer wrote down as though it explained the name.
How old is the name Zabrina?
Zabrina first appears in US birth records in 1965 — 60 years ago. The typical Zabrina alive today was born around 1990, making them about 35 years old. About 1,300 people named Zabrina are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Zabrina most popular?
Zabrina peaked in 1977, reaching #1952 nationally. See the whole 1977 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From A pre-Roman river name of unrecovered meaning to Zabrina
The story of Zabrina
River names are the oldest layer on any map. They survive changes of language, population and religion, because a river cannot be renamed by a new arrival who has to ask the locals which one it is, and a very large number of British river names are pre-Celtic: older than any language now spoken in the islands, meaning nothing to anybody who has used them for three thousand years. This is one of them. The legend about the drowned girl is a folk etymology of exactly the kind such names attract, invented to explain a word that had stopped meaning anything, and it was already in circulation when the earliest surviving account was written.
Meaning
the river Severn
The Latin name of the river, which is what the personal name comes from. The river's own name is pre-Roman and its meaning has never been recovered; it is probably older than Celtic. So the personal name means a river whose name means nothing anybody can establish, and the drowning legend is an explanation invented afterwards to account for it.
How the name formed
- A pre-Roman river name of unrecovered meaning
- A legend invented to explain it
- Sabrina as a personal name from the Renaissance
- Zabrina, with a z substituted at the front
Related forms: Hafren
Pronouncing Zabrina
zuh-BREE-nuh
Three syllables with the stress in the middle. The z at the front is a genuine sound change rather than a silent decoration: this spelling and the s one are audibly different, which is unusual among American respellings.
Nicknames for Zabrina
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
- 1965
- Most girls named
- 197750 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #1952reached in 1977
- Change vs 2022
- 0.0%11 in 2023, 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.
Zabrina in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Hafren in Welsh — related form
Zabrinas among us
people named Zabrina 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
Zabrina 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 z makes the name audibly distinct, which most respellings do not manage.
- Bree and Rina are two very different short forms and both stand alone.
- It carries a real and very old river with a good story attached.
- Sabrina is the standard spelling and this one will be corrected into it.
- The z front is unusual enough to be commented on.
- The river's own name has no recoverable meaning, so the name means a place and nothing more.
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Zabrina
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Zabrinas are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 1,300 people named Zabrina are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Zabrina in 2025?
- Zabrina is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Zabrina with classmates?
- Zabrina will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More Z names
The most-given names starting with Z, all years combined.
Zoe#31 · Zoey#69 · Zara#212 · Zuri#328 · Zelma#6838 · Zelda#832 · Zariah#449 · Zella#1733
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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