Nala has multiple parallel origins. In Swahili, nala means "gift," "queen," or "successful." In Sanskrit, nala (नल) means "lotus stem" or "hollow reed." In Hindu mythology, Nala is also the name of a king from the Mahabharata.
The name entered the U.S. top 1000 in 2019 and is now in the top 300.
Nala 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 Nala reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.