Una - Name Meaning and Popularity -

Meaning of Una

As an Anglicized rendering of the Old Irish Úna—most plausibly rooted in úan, “lamb,” yet unmistakably echoing the Latin una, “one” or “unity”—Una possesses a semantic duality that intertwines pastoral gentleness with conceptual strength. Pronounced OO-nə throughout North America and Ireland, and more rarely YOO-nə in Britain, the name gained wide literary currency when Edmund Spenser cast the virtuous heroine Una in The Faerie Queene, thereby aligning it with ideals of integrity and steadfast truth. From its Gaelic heartlands the name migrated with nineteenth-century settlers to the United States, where records show a moderate peak in the early 1920s before a gradual decline to its present, quietly distinctive status—hovering in the lower nineties on contemporary popularity tables and yielding fewer than seventy annual registrations since 2010. Cultural visibility endures through figures such as Irish singer-songwriter Una Healy and character actress Una O’Connor, both of whom reaffirm its Celtic pedigree. Phonetically compact, vowel-rich, and readily paired with a wide variety of surnames, Una thus occupies a distinctive onomastic niche: historically layered yet stylistically spare, familiar yet uncommon, equally capable of invoking pastoral tenderness or singular resolve.