Yola
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in Spanish: yawl; small boat with oars and sail (kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations))
A female name· listed as female by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 25 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/ˈɟ͡ʝo.la/(recorded in a dictionary) Spanish · from Wiktionary
Yola is a female given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Angola than in any other country. In Bolivia it is the 60th most common given name.
- BOBolivia≈1 in 2.1K(inferred from the name graph)
- AOAngola≈1 in 2.9Kfew records
- PEPeru≈1 in 8.5K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Angola (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 104 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.1K (inferred from the name graph)
≈13,000 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Bolivia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
How to pronounce Yola
- Spanish:/ˈɟ͡ʝo.la/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
- Indonesian:/jˈola/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Hausa: firefly; city in eastern Nigeria.
Cited for this meaning 1
- African Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
How Yola is read
(measured from records)Yola is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Spanish54%
yawl; small boat with oars and sail
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- English20%
cocaine
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Indonesian13%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Yola in Indonesian.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Yola 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AO Angola | #579 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.9K | 2 | Yola | 19 |
| BO Bolivia | #60 | ≈5,900 est. | ≈1 in 2.1K | — | Yola | 25 |
| PE Peru | — | ≈4,000 est. | ≈1 in 8.5K | — | Yola | 35 |
| MX Mexico | — | ≈2,800 est. | ≈1 in 47K | — | Yola | 51 |
| CO Colombia | — | ≈920 est. | ≈1 in 57K | — | Yola | 20 |
| US United States | — | 519 | 1 in 641K | 513 | Yola | 104 |
| LB Lebanon | — | ≈170 est. | ≈1 in 35K | — | Yola | 4 |
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; Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names. 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)Yola is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Hausa, Hausa: firefly; city in eastern Nigeria.
as a nameAfrican Names
In German, weibl. Vom., Kurzform von
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
Delightful, agreeable.
as a nameThe African book of names
Firefly.
as a nameThe African book of names
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)- Yola Berrocalb. 1970ESSpanish media personality
- Yola Semedob. 1978AOrenowned Angolan singer
- Yola Mgogwanab. 2008ZASouth African climate activist
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)Evidence
(measured from records)44 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 25 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Yola come from?
- Hausa: firefly; city in eastern Nigeria. Recorded by African Names.
- How do you pronounce Yola?
- It depends on the language: in Spanish /ˈɟ͡ʝo.la/ (Wiktionary); in Indonesian /jˈola/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- Which countries have the most people named Yola?
- Mondonomo estimates about 13 thousand people named Yola in Angola, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled yola. After it come Bolivia, Peru, Mexico and Colombia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Is Yola a male or female name?
- Yola is a female name. National registers that list it by sex list it as female: United States (Census Bureau, 2020).
- What does the name Yola mean?
- In Spanish, yawl; small boat with oars and sail
- How common is the name Yola?
- In the United States, the national register counted 519 people named Yola in 2020, about 1 in 641 thousand residents.
- How common is Yola compared with other names?
- In Angola, Yola is the 579th most common given name of 11,132 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Yola?
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/yolaThe 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, “Yola” — ranked 173rd in Angola (Wikidata humans by citizenship). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.