Variant of Delilah, from Hebrew meaning delicate or languishing.
Delila is a variant spelling of Delilah, one of the most narratively charged names in the Hebrew Bible. The original Hebrew דְּלִילָה (Delilah) most likely derives from the root dalal, meaning "to be low," "to languish," or "to weaken"—a meaning that resonates with painful precision in her most famous biblical role. In the Book of Judges, Delilah is the woman who extracts the secret of Samson's supernatural strength and delivers him to the Philistines, an act that has made her name a byword for seductive betrayal across three thousand years of moral literature.
Yet the story is more textured than the archetype suggests. The biblical text never explicitly calls Delilah villainous; she is a woman negotiating survival in a context of political conflict between peoples, and her motivations are left deliberately opaque. This ambiguity has made her irresistible to artists: she appears in Milton, in Handel's oratorio Samson (1743), in Camille Saint-Saëns's opera Samson et Dalila (1877), and in countless visual artworks that frame her as simultaneously dangerous and sympathetic.
The 1967 Tom Jones hit "Delilah" transformed the name again, associating it with passion and tragedy in the popular imagination. The simplified spelling Delila softens the name slightly, making it feel more intimate and less weighted by its dramatic history. In recent years Delilah—in its various forms—has enjoyed a significant revival, as parents embrace its lyrical sound and its complex, powerful heritage without feeling entirely bound by its cautionary dimensions.