Wela

given name · Latin script

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Wela is a given name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the Philippines. Recorded meaning: A shortening of Manuela, Roela.

rarermore common
  • ZASouth Africa
  • PHPhilippines
  • SGSingapore

Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Philippines (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

Sources
24 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

A shortening of Manuela, Roela.

Sources 1

Where in the world(measured from records)

Wela counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Wela is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
PH Philippines—Wela20
US United States—Wela24
ZA South Africa—Wela9
NL Netherlands—Wela2
SG Singapore—Wela4
DE Germany—Wela8

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.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Wela is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish given name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Philippines, United States, Angola, Brazil

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Wëlã, Welã

  • Amharic given name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Philippines, Ethiopia, Türkiye

    Also written ወላ

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Wēlā

33 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Wela is also recorded in 6 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Cebuano, a female given name from Cebuano

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In ss, to cross (path, road, river)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In gem-pro, well (in a good manner)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Northern Sotho, to fall into

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In pap, grandmother

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Hawaiian, to be hot

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Notable people with this name(measured from records)

  • Vela Peevab. 1922BGnot in their usual nameBulgarian heroine

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).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 5 sources across 2 countries.

Reference works 3

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 Wela mean, and where does it come from?
A shortening of Manuela, Roela. Recorded by Wiktionary.
Is Wela a male or female name?
Wela 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 Wela have the most bearers?
Wela is most frequently recorded in the Philippines, where it is most often spelled wela.

What do you want to know about Wela?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/wela

The 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, “Wela”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Wela parses inside a full name →