Lakeisha is an American invented name from the 1960s-70s — combining the French-derived prefix La- with Keisha (possibly from the Arabic-Swahili Aisha, "alive, living, joyful," or a phonetic blend). A top-500 US baby name from 1972 to 1991, one of the most-popular distinctively African American girls' names of its era — emblematic of the post-Civil-Rights-era movement among Black American families to choose names that asserted cultural identity and individuality. *The name and its variants (Lakisha, Lakesha, Latisha) became a notable subject of sociolinguistic and economic research — most famously the 2004 Bertrand-Mullainathan study "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?" published in the American Economic Review, which used the name to document hiring discrimination and became one of the most-cited papers in labor economics. LaKisha Jones (born 1980) — American Idol season 6 finalist (2007); Broadway performer in The Color Purple and Motown: The Musical*. Lakeisha remains a culturally significant name studied in courses on naming, identity, and the sociology of the African American experience. The name exemplifies the creative-naming tradition that also produced Shaniqua, Tamika, and Latoya.
Featured throughout late-20th-century African American naming tradition.
Lakeisha 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 Lakeisha reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.