Ayla is the Turkish word for the halo of light around the moon — the soft circle of brightness on a humid night. In Hebrew it means "oak" or "terebinth tree." Two completely separate origins for a single name that has, over the past decade, become one of the fastest-rising girl names in the Western world.
Ayla appeared first in the American consciousness through Jean Auel's 1980 novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, whose Cro-Magnon heroine is named Ayla.
Ayla does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Ayla reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.