Entry № 5804 · Hebrew origin

Leah Leah — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ LEE-ah /
Gender
Girl
Origin
Hebrew
Meaning
"Weary, languid"
Syllables
1
First recorded
Ancient (Hebrew Bible)

A name that means "weary, languid".

Leah comes from the Hebrew Lēʾāh (לֵאָה), traditionally translated as "weary" — though some scholars suggest a connection to the Akkadian word for "cow," reflecting the agricultural setting of the patriarchs. In Genesis, Leah is the first wife of Jacob and the mother of six of his twelve sons, including Judah (ancestor of King David).

Leah has been continuously in use in Jewish communities for thousands of years and entered broader Christian use through Puritan and Protestant influence. Today it sits in the U.S. top 50 and is among the most commonly chosen Hebrew names in English-speaking countries — short, soft, biblical.

The matriarch whose name became a thousand granddaughters'.

The name in its native script.

לֵאָה
Transliteration
Lēʾāh
Pronunciation
/ ˈliː.ə /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Leah stands.

Leah 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.

Leahs before her.

Real people
Leah Remini
American actress. Star of The King of Queens.
born 1970
In fiction
Leah
First wife of Jacob and matriarch in the Hebrew Bible.
Genesis
Princess Leia Organa
Heroine of Star Wars (different transliteration of the same Hebrew name).
1977–present

Names connected to Leah.

The number behind Leah.

8

The Visionary

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Leah reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.