Sophia (given name)


Sophia, also spelled Sofia, is a feminine given name, from Greek Σοφία, Sophía, "Wisdom". Diminutive forms include Sophie and Sofie.
The given name is first recorded in the beginning of the 4th century. It is a common female name in the Eastern Orthodox countries. It became very popular in the West beginning in the later 1990s and became one of the most popularly given girls' names in the Western world during the 2010s.

Popularity

The name was comparatively common in continental Europe in the medieval and early modern period.
It was popularized in Britain by the German House of Hanover in the 18th century.
It was repeatedly popularised among the wider population, by the name of a character in the novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, in The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, and in the 1960s by Italian actress Sophia Loren.
Sophia was comparatively popular in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century; its use declined in the 1920s to 1950s; it became again moderately popular during the 1960s to 1980s.
During the 1990s to 2010s the popularity of the name rose dramatically in many countries throughout the western world. Suggested influences for this trend include Sofía Vergara and Sofia Coppola and Sofia Hellqvist.
Sophia was the most popularly given girls' name in the United States during 2011-2013. The form Sofia was rarely given in the United States before the 1970s; it also steeply rose in popularity in the 1990s to 2000s and peaked at rank 12 in 2012.
When combined all spelling variants together, Sophia was the most popular name for 8 years in a row during 2000-2017 in the United States.
Sophie was the fifth most popular name for girls in Australia in 2013.
The name had a similar rise in popularity in other countries, reaching rank 1 in the 2010s in Italy, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Russia and Estonia. and was in the top ten most popular girls' names in the Czech Republic,
in Poland,
Spain, Switzerland
Romania and Bulgaria.

Name variants

Greek Σοφία was adopted without significant phonological changes into numerous languages,
as Sophia
and Sofia.
The spelling Soffia is Icelandic and Welsh. Hungarian has Zsófia.
Modern Spanish uses the acute diacritic, Sofía.
South and East Slavic and Baltic languages have Sofija, Sofiya and Sofya.
West Slavic introduced a voiced sibilant, Zofia, Žofia, Žofie.
French has the hypocoristic Sophie, which was also introduced in German, Dutch/Flemish, English
and Scandinavian in the spelling Sofie.
A Dutch hypocoristic is Sofieke.
Russian has the hypocoristic Соня, which in the late 19th century was introduced to Western languages, in the spellings Sonya, Sonia and Sonja, via characters with this name in the novels Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
Turkish Safiye is from the unrelated Arabic Safiyya.
Persian Sofia is from unrelated Sufi, a sect of Islam.

People

Saints