Meaning and history
Anna is a form of Hannah used in the Greek and Latin Old Testament, though many later translations, including English, prefer Hannah; in the New Testament, Anna is the name of a prophetess who recognized Jesus as the Messiah. The name was popular in the Byzantine Empire from an early date and became common among Western Christians in the Middle Ages through devotion to Saint Anna, traditionally identified as the mother of the Virgin Mary. In England, Anna has been used alongside the vernacular forms Ann and Anne since the late Middle Ages, and since the 1970s it has been the most common of these spellings in English-speaking countries, although Hannah is now more popular than all three. The name was also borne by several Russian royals, including an 18th-century empress of Russia, and by the title character of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), a married aristocrat whose relationship with Count Vronsky ends tragically.
20062006: 8,613 births, rank #22
2007: 7,901 births, rank #25
2008: 7,278 births, rank #26
2009: 6,818 births, rank #28
2010: 6,336 births, rank #27
20112011: 5,675 births, rank #38
2012: 5,630 births, rank #34
2013: 5,398 births, rank #35
2014: 5,706 births, rank #34
2015: 5,150 births, rank #44
20162016: 4,810 births, rank #49
2017: 4,574 births, rank #53
2018: 4,198 births, rank #54
2019: 3,849 births, rank #63
2020: 3,511 births, rank #68
20212021: 3,082 births, rank #85
2022: 2,962 births, rank #83
2023: 2,934 births, rank #79
2024: 2,716 births, rank #94
20252025: 2,521 births, rank #107
Anna moved from #94 to #107 for girls between 2024 and 2025. Its highest annual birth count came in 1918, with 15,666 births.