Hungarian3 syllablesHistorical namesake
Meaning: traditionally "little father", from Gothic atta with a diminutive.
Attila
| Origin | Hungarian use of the name of Attila, ruler of the Huns, who died in 453 |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Gothic atta (father) plus the diminutive -ila, so "little father". Turkic derivations have been proposed and none has been established |
| Pronunciation | OT-til-law in Hungarian, stress on the first syllable, with the short rounded Hungarian a; uh-TIL-uh in English. The Hungarian spelling carries no accents, so it matches the English one exactly |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100 and rare in America; an everyday name in Hungary and among Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, and common in Turkey as Atilla |
| Variants | Atilla (Turkish), Etele (the Hungarian legendary form), Etzel (Middle High German, in the Nibelungenlied), Atli (Old Norse) |
| Nicknames | Ati, Atti |
| Historical bearer | Attila, ruler of the Hunnic Empire from 434 to 453 |
History & meaning
Attila ruled the Huns from 434, first beside his brother Bleda and then alone. He took tribute out of Constantinople, campaigned the length of the Balkans, and was fought to a standstill in Gaul at the Catalaunian Plains in 451; he died two years later. The name itself does not look Hunnic. The standard derivation is Gothic, atta for father with the affectionate ending -ila, a name that would have come to him from the Germanic circulating inside his own empire.
Hungarian tradition made him an ancestor. Simon of Kéza, writing in the 1280s, ran the Huns and the Magyars together into a single story with Árpád as Attila's heir and the crown of Hungary as Hun inheritance. Modern scholarship does not support the descent. Hungarian is a Uralic language, related to Finnish and Estonian and more closely to Khanty and Mansi in Siberia, and related to nothing the Huns are thought to have spoken; five centuries and a great deal of steppe sit between the two arrivals. Both halves are true at once. The Hun ancestry is legend, and the name is real, current and cheerfully Hungarian.
Why parents choose it
In Hungary, Attila is unremarkable in the best sense — a name on class registers, in phone books and over shop doors, carrying about as much menace as Julius does in English. Outside Hungary the arithmetic changes, because Attila the Hun is a stock English phrase for ruthlessness and a boy will hear about it. Families who use the name abroad tend to be families with a reason to.
Middle names for Attila
Three light syllables ending in a vowel want something blunter after them: Attila Zsolt, Attila Márton, Attila Endre, Attila Tamás. The middle names guide sets out the general rules.
Famous Attilas
The poet Attila József (1905–1937) is the bearer who matters most in Hungary, and his work sits on every school syllabus there. Attila Petschauer won Olympic sabre gold with the Hungarian team in 1928 and again in 1932, and died in a forced-labour camp in 1943. Among the living, the defender Attila Szalai has played for the Hungary national team.
Consider instead
Bendegúz is Attila's father in the Hungarian legend, and rarer. Csaba is his son in the same tradition, with none of the historical weight. Hunor takes you to the origin story itself, where the Magyars trace their descent from a hunt.