Meaning and history
Cordelia comes from Cordeilla, the name of King Leir’s youngest daughter in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century chronicles, where she is the only one to remain loyal to her father. Geoffrey may have based the name on Creiddylad, a figure from Welsh legend. The spelling later changed to Cordelia in later retellings, including Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606).
20062006: 129 births, rank #1,639
2007: 111 births, rank #1,877
2008: 132 births, rank #1,685
2009: 175 births, rank #1,358
2010: 181 births, rank #1,299
20112011: 181 births, rank #1,301
2012: 208 births, rank #1,179
2013: 201 births, rank #1,192
2014: 267 births, rank #993
2015: 286 births, rank #949
20162016: 263 births, rank #1,005
2017: 210 births, rank #1,172
2018: 249 births, rank #1,035
2019: 231 births, rank #1,083
2020: 252 births, rank #1,006
20212021: 253 births, rank #1,010
2022: 242 births, rank #1,052
2023: 220 births, rank #1,117
2024: 233 births, rank #1,066
20252025: 258 births, rank #980
Cordelia moved from #949 to #981 for girls between 2015 and 2025. Its highest annual birth count came in 2015, with 286 births.