Boys' Names Ending in -a Part 1

The sidekick in a John Wayne western.

Chelsea for a boy? Yes--and we've got two maleberry Chelseas to prove it (one of whom even wrote a blog for us about his experience)! Boy Chelseas would more likely be named for the British football team than the old Joni Mitchell song sung by Judy Collins.

In The Hunger Games series, Cinna is the influential costume designer for Katniss. In ancient Rome, one Cinna was the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and another was a conspirator against Caesar.

While the original Irish St. Columba was male, the modern Irish variation Colm or Scottish Callum would be more appropriate for a contemporary boy. We can, however, imagine Columba as a rhythmic and contemporary-sounding girl's name.

Soul singer Cuba Gooding and his actor son of the same name put this unexpected geographical name on the map for boys, but it has a longer history of use than you might expect. Deriving from the island in the Caribbean Sea, it had a brief spell of popularity in the US at the end of the 1890s when Spain lost possession of the island during the Spanish-American War. Used predominantly (though rarely) on girls throughout the last century, it has occasionally be given to a handful of boys too.