Cécilia
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Du latin Caecilia; forme savante de Cécile
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/sesilja/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Cécilia is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country.
- SESweden1 in 155(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 1.2K
- ESSpain1 in 2.6K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- Sources
- 500 (measured from records)
- 1 in 155 (inferred from the name graph)
171,217 people, 2022
Highest-authority source
Sweden
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Cecilia in US United States, SE Sweden, EC Ecuador and Cecília in BR Brazil.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Du latin Caecilia; forme savante de Cécile.
Sources 1
- Dictionnaire généalogique des prénoms
Attested across 27 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Cécilia counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | — | 171,217 | 1 in 1.2K | 171K | Cecília | 95 |
| US United States | #578 | 109,389 | 1 in 3K | 109K | Cecilia | 500 |
| SE Sweden | #289 | 65,798 | 1 in 155 | 66K | Cecilia | 122 |
| EC Ecuador | — | 25,781 | 1 in 656 | 26K | Cecilia | 29 |
| ES Spain | — | 19,467 | 1 in 2.6K | 20K | Cécilia | 106 |
| FI Finland | — | 5,226 | 1 in 1.1K | 7.7K | — | 27 |
| CR Costa Rica | — | 3,740 | 1 in 1.4K | 3.7K | — | 1 |
171,217 people counted by IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror), 2022, counting the spelling cecilia. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INEC — civil registry names; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Cécilia Mourgue d'Algueb. 1946FRFrench golfer (1946-)
- Cécilia Attiasb. 1957FRformer wife of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy
- Cécilia Hornusb. 1963FRFrench actress
- Cécilia Gabizonb. 1969FRFrench journalist
- Cécilia Gondardb. 1980FRFrench politician
- Cécilia Carab. 1984FRFrench actress and singer
- Cécilia Josserandb. 1987FRFrench association football player
- Cécilia Berderb. 1989FRFrench fencer
- Cecilia Boueleb. 1993CGCongolese sprinter
- Cécilia RouaudFRFrench writer and director
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 22 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 39 | #8,391 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 22 | #23,126 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register) | — | 18 | — |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 15 | #29,439 |
Reference works 2
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Cécilia mean, and where does it come from?
- Du latin Caecilia; forme savante de Cécile. Recorded by Dictionnaire généalogique des prénoms.
- What are other forms of the name Cécilia?
- In the etymology graph, Sheila, Celia and Shelia are forms of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Cécilia?
- A machine transcription gives /sesilja/ (IPA) for French.
- Is Cécilia a male or female name?
- Cécilia is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Cécilia have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 171 thousand people named Cécilia, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cecília.
- Where is Cécilia most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Cécilia is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 155 people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Cécilia?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 171,217 people named Cécilia in 2022, about 1 in 1.2 thousand residents.
- How common is Cécilia compared with other names?
- In Sweden, Cécilia is the 289th most common given name of 45,482 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Cécilia?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/c%C3%A9ciliaThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Cécilia” — the 289th most common given name in Sweden. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.