Portia
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Latin; an offering; the heroine in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/pɔɹʃə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Portia is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country.
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 1.3K(inferred from the name graph)
- GHGhana≈1 in 3.7K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 34K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- South Africa (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 353 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.3K (inferred from the name graph)
≈42,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
South Africa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Latin; an offering; the heroine in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
Sources 1
- Baby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
Where in the world(measured from records)
Portia counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | #194 | ≈42,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | — | Portia | 87 |
| US United States | — | 8,540 | 1 in 39K | 8.5K | Portia | 353 |
| GH Ghana | #147 | ≈7,900 est. | ≈1 in 3.7K | — | Portia | 53 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈3,300 est. | ≈1 in 80K | — | Portia | 13 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈2,300 est. | ≈1 in 48K | — | Portia | 56 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈760 est. | ≈1 in 34K | 3 | Portia | 116 |
| GY Guyana | — | 24 | 1 in 31K | 24 | — | 2 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Portia is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, weibl. Vom., weibliche Form des römischen Geschlechter namens Pordus. Der Name ist bekannt durch die Gestalt der Portia in Shakespeares Drama »Der Kaufmann von Venedig« (1600). floul tps«l]: männl. Vom., dänische Form von
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Portia Washington Pittmanb. 1883USAmerican musician and teacher
- Portia Whiteb. 1911CACanadian opera singer (1911-1968)
- Portia Simpson-Millerb. 1945JMformer prime minister of Jamaica
- Portia Duval-Rigbyb. 1970AUfigure skater
- Portia de Rossib. 1973AUAustralian-American actress
- Portia Modiseb. 1983ZASouth African footballer
- Portia Perezb. 1987CACanadian professional wrestler
- Portia Doubledayb. 1988USAmerican actress
- Portia Woodmanb. 1991NZNew Zealand rugby union player
- Portia Booroffactress
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 35 sources across 22 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 8.5K | #2,743 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 24 | #570 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 14 | #2,743 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 14 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 1989 | 8 | — |
| AU Australia | Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM) | 2014 | 3 | — |
| AU Australia | AU state BDM — consolidated top baby names (NSW + SA + QLD) | 2017 | 1 | — |
| AU Australia | SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present) | 2017 | 1 | — |
Reference works 2
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Portia mean, and where does it come from?
- Latin; an offering; the heroine in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice Recorded by Baby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular….
- Is Portia a male or female name?
- Portia is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- How do you pronounce Portia?
- A machine transcription gives /pɔɹʃə/ (IPA) for English.
- What are other forms of the name Portia?
- In the etymology graph, Porcia is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Portia have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 42 thousand people named Portia in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled portia.
- How common is the name Portia?
- In the United States, the national register counted 8,540 people named Portia in 2020, about 1 in 39 thousand residents.
- How common is Portia compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Portia is the 194th most common given name of 189,620 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Portia?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/portiaThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Portia” — the 194th most common given name in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.