Dahlia

The flower itself was cultivated by the Aztecs long before European contact. Known in Nahuatl as cocoxochitl, the hollow stems were used as water pipes and the tubers as food.

Spanish explorers sent specimens from the Royal Botanical Garden of Mexico to Madrid in the 1780s, where Cavanilles successfully propagated them and assigned the genus name. The dahlia was later designated the national flower of Mexico in 1963.

As a given name, Dahlia appeared sporadically in English-language records during the Victorian period, part of the broader 19th-century fashion for flower names that produced Rose, Lily, Violet, and Daisy.

The name also carries significance in modern Hebrew, where Dalia is a common given name independently derived from a Hebrew word for a flowering branch, leading to frequent convergence between the 2 traditions in Israeli and Jewish diaspora

communities.

According to U.S. Social Security Administration records, Dahlia first entered the top 1000 in 2006 and has climbed steadily since, reaching the top 200 by the early 2020s.

Variant spellings Dalia and Daliah extend the footprint further, particularly among Hispanic and Jewish American families.

Notable bearers include the Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005) and characters in novels by P. G. Wodehouse, whose fictional Aunt Dahlia appears throughout the Jeeves and Wooster series beginning in 1922.