Mariana

This secondary association eclipsed the classical root in most modern speakers’ understanding.

The earliest prominent bearer of the Latin name was Saint Mariana, a 4th-century martyr venerated in the early Eastern Church. The name spread through the Iberian Peninsula during the medieval period, where it attached itself firmly to Marian devotion.

Juan de Mariana (1536-1624), the Spanish Jesuit historian and political theorist, carried the masculine form and authored the monumental Historia de rebus Hispaniae.

In literature, the name gained lasting recognition through Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Mariana (1830), which drew on the abandoned fiancée of the same name in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (c. 1604).

The pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais immortalized Tennyson’s heroine in his 1851 painting Mariana, now in the Tate Britain collection.

The name also belongs to the Pacific trench named for Queen Mariana of Austria, regent of Spain in the 17th century.

According to U.S. Social Security Administration records, Mariana has appeared in the top 1000 since the 1880s and entered the top 200 in the early 2000s, driven substantially by Hispanic American families for whom it remains a staple.

In Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain it has ranked among the most popular girls’ names of the 21st century, with the Portuguese form sometimes written Marianna and the Romanian spelling identical to the standard form.