Emily: The Name That Kept Finding Its Way Back to Us

My wife and I have been arguing about baby names for months. We have a list on the fridge, a shared notes app, and a Google doc that neither of us admits we’re still updating. We’ve crossed names off for reasons that would embarrass us to say out loud — too many syllables, bad associations from middle school, a character from a show we stopped watching. We thought we were being thorough. Then one night I was going through a box of my grandmother’s things we’d been meaning to sort, and I found the journal she kept during her pregnancies. She had five kids. She wrote down candidate names for each one in careful, slanted cursive. There, on a page for my mother’s older sister — who ended up named Patricia — was a shortlist. Third on the list, with a small star penciled beside it: Emily.

I set the journal down and didn’t say anything for a while. My wife asked what I’d found. I showed her. She looked at the star next to Emily, looked at me, and we both sort of knew. That’s not how naming a baby is supposed to work — you’re supposed to weigh syllables and honor relatives and run names through the playground-cruelty test. But sometimes a name just arrives.

We live in Portland, on a street full of kids with names I genuinely love — Lilas and Junos and Mabels. Emily feels different from those. It has a longer story, a wider footprint. That felt right for this particular baby, who already seems, from the ultrasounds, to have a personality that isn’t easily summarized.

What Emily Actually Means

Emily comes from the Latin Aemilia, the feminine form of the Roman family name Aemilius, itself derived from the Latin root aemulus. That word means rival — specifically, one who strives to equal or surpass, someone who competes, who pushes to match what they see in others. Over time the meaning broadened into what we’d recognize today as industrious or eager. The name carries ambition in its bones.

I find this more meaningful than I expected. A name rooted in the idea of striving — not dominating, not winning outright, but genuinely reaching to match and exceed — feels like a quality worth passing forward. [Link: Latin baby names and their meanings] There’s nothing passive about Emily’s etymology. The word aemulus gave us the English word “emulate.” To be an Emily, in the oldest sense, is to be someone who sees excellence and reaches toward it.

Some sources will tell you Emily simply means “industrious” and leave it there. The rivalry angle is more interesting and more honest. It suggests a competitive spirit — a person who rises when they see something worth rising to.

Where the Name Comes From

The Aemilia family was one of the great patrician clans of ancient Rome — the gens Aemilia, whose members included consuls, generals, and censors across centuries of Roman history. The name traveled from Rome through the Latin-speaking church and into medieval Europe, where it absorbed into local languages and took on new shapes.

The English form Emily arrived largely through Italian and French influence. Emilia remained prominent in Italian — Shakespeare used it for Iago’s outspoken, clear-eyed wife in Othello, one of his most underestimated characters. The French Émilie circulated in aristocratic circles. German-speaking countries had Emilie and the parallel form Amalie. By the 18th century, Emily had settled into English as its own distinct form, and the Romantic era — with its appetite for names that felt both classical and intimately personal — cemented its place. [Link: Victorian-era baby names still in use today] The 19th century is also when its most famous bearers were doing their most important work, which is not a coincidence. It was a name for women who took things seriously.

How Popular Is Emily Right Now

Emily currently sits at #25 on the SSA rankings for girls — a strong, settled position that reflects a name in something like a second bloom.

The decade-by-decade count tells a more dramatic story. In the 1980s, roughly 132,297 babies in the United States were named Emily. The 1990s brought an explosion: 237,644 babies received the name, tracking Emily’s rise to the very top of the charts — it held the #1 spot for girls for over a decade, from 1996 through 2007. The 2000s stayed nearly as strong, with 224,148 babies named Emily. Then, as happens with dominant names once saturation sets in, the numbers fell: the 2010s brought 117,757 babies named Emily, and the 2020s show 32,163 so far, with years still to come in the decade.

What this means practically: a girl named Emily today is unlikely to be one of four Emilys in her kindergarten class, as she might have been in 2001. The name has room to breathe. It’s recognizable without being overwhelming, familiar without being tired. That’s a rare position for a name to land in, and Emily has earned it honestly.

Famous Emilys Worth Knowing

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) — the American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in her lifetime, published fewer than a dozen of them, and still became one of the defining voices in the English language; her work on death, immortality, and the interior life remains strange and alive.

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) — author of Wuthering Heights, one of the most psychologically intense novels in the English canon, written in the Yorkshire moors and published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell; she died at thirty and left exactly one novel, which has never gone out of print.

Emily Blunt — British actress who has made a career out of resisting easy categorization, moving between The Devil Wears Prada, Sicario, A Quiet Place, and Oppenheimer with a consistency that few actors working today can match.

Emily St. John Mandel — Canadian author of Station Eleven, a novel about a traveling Shakespeare company in the aftermath of a pandemic that became newly resonant when an actual pandemic arrived and was later adapted into an acclaimed HBO series.

Emily Ratajkowski — model and author whose essay collection My Body opened a serious conversation about agency, image, and the female gaze in ways that reached well beyond fashion media.

Emily Murphy (1868–1933) — Canadian suffragist and the first woman appointed as a judge in the British Empire, whose legal work on women’s personhood still echoes in Canadian law and whose face appeared on the Canadian fifty-dollar bill.

Variants and Nicknames

The Emily family is wide. In Italian, Emilia carries the same roots with a slightly softer, more continental feel and has been rising in English-speaking countries on its own terms. French speakers use Émilie. Spanish has both Emilia and Emily in active circulation. German has Emilie alongside the parallel form Amalie. Scandinavian countries favor Emilia. The diminutive Emi is common in Japanese contexts, where the name has been adopted phonetically.

In English, Emily rarely gets shortened — three syllables, a clean flow, an easy rhythm. But when it does: Em is the most natural contraction, quiet and affectionate. Emmy is warm and cheerful and works especially well for a small child. Millie has become popular enough to stand alone and also functions naturally as a nickname for Emily. If you want the name’s roots without its recognition level, Emilia is worth serious consideration — same etymology, slightly fresher ears.

Why This Name Keeps Coming Back

I keep thinking about that star my grandmother drew next to Emily in her notebook, sometime in the late 1950s. She never used it. It stayed on a list, folded into a box, moved across decades. And somehow it made it to us, sixty-some years later, in a city my grandmother never visited, in a century she didn’t live to see. That feels like something worth honoring — not just the name, but the fact that it waited.

But beyond the story, which is personal to us, Emily holds up on its own. It means something real: to strive, to reach, to rival the best of what you see. It has centuries of use without feeling ancient. It gave us Dickinson and Brontë — two women who did their most essential work quietly, without recognition in their lifetimes, and whose work outlasted nearly everything contemporary to it. Our daughter isn’t here yet. But I think when she arrives, the name will fit. My grandmother seemed to think so too.