Matilda comes from the Germanic Mahthildis — maht (might) + hild (battle) — meaning "mighty in battle." Empress Matilda (1102-1167), claimant to the English throne, is the most famous medieval bearer.
Matilda has been rising rapidly since Roald Dahl's 1988 novel Matilda. Today it sits in the U.S. top 400 and is climbing fast.
Matilda 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 Matilda reduce to 6, The Nurturer. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.