Krista

Meaning of Krista

Krista, pronounced KRIS-tuh (/krɪs-tə/), constitutes a truncated variant of the Latin-derived Christina, itself rooted in the Greek Christós, “anointed,” and functions within Anglo-American onomastics as a concise, theophoric feminine given name. Its phonological profile, characterized by a primary stress on the initial syllable and a reduced, unstressed vowel in the second, aligns with English trochaic preferences and facilitates its diffusion across anglophone contexts. Statistical analyses of United States Social Security data reveal that Krista attained its highest popularity in the mid-1980s—reaching a rank of 91 in 1986 with 3,054 occurrences—before embarking on a protracted decline to its 2024 position at rank 920 with just 30 recorded births. The name’s historical association with Christian heritage, combined with its morphological economy and phonetic clarity, underpins its enduring, if now attenuated, presence within the corpus of contemporary American given names.