Melinda is from the Greek meli (honey) + the Spanish -inda ("sweet, lovely") — an 18th-century English literary invention. A top-150 US baby name from 1957 to 1981. Melinda French Gates (born 1964) — American philanthropist; co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 (now the Gates Foundation), which has distributed over $77 billion in grants and is one of the world's largest private philanthropic organizations; her focus areas include global women's health, family planning, and gender equality. In 2015 founded Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company supporting women and families through investment. Time 100 Most Influential People (2005). Forbes #4 Most Powerful Woman in the World (2013). After divorce from Bill Gates (2021), pledged $1 billion to organizations supporting women's rights globally (2024). Melinda Gates (Carleton College, Duke MBA). Melinda Doolittle — American Idol Season 6 finalist. Melinda Dillon (Close Encounters, A Christmas Story).
Featured throughout 21st-century philanthropy.
Melinda 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 Melinda reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.