From Greek mythology, Leda was a queen of Sparta visited by Zeus in the form of a swan.
Leda comes from ancient Greek mythology as the name of the Spartan queen whose encounter with Zeus — who had transformed himself into a swan — produced the most consequential offspring in classical legend: Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships; Clytemnestra, whose blade ended Agamemnon; and the divine twins Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri. The name's etymology is uncertain — possible connections to the Lycian word for "woman" have been proposed — but its mythological weight is immeasurable. The story of Leda and the Swan has haunted Western art for millennia.
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Tintoretto all painted versions of it, as did Cy Twombly in the twentieth century. B. Yeats gave the myth its most electrically compressed poetic form in his 1923 sonnet "Leda and the Swan," which meditates on violence, divinity, and history's hinge moments.
For Yeats, Leda was the point at which one civilization ended and another began — the moment of annunciation that set Greek antiquity in motion. As a given name, Leda has remained consciously rare — used by parents who knew their classics and wanted a name that carried myth without being grandiose. It has a purity of sound, two clean syllables, that suits it well. In contemporary naming, Leda has found a modest audience among parents drawn to short, melodic names with ancient pedigree: it sits comfortably alongside Clio, Io, and Thea as names that offer genuine mythology without self-importance.