Elaboration of the word 'love,' coined as a given name in 18th-century America.
Lovina most likely developed as an elaboration of Lavinia — the ancient Latin name borne by the legendary princess of Latium whom Aeneas marries in Virgil's Aeneid, thereby founding the Roman bloodline. Lavinia was the name of a place before it was a person (Lavinium, a city Aeneas supposedly named for her), and through Virgil it became one of the foundational names of Western classical tradition.
Shakespeare also used it in Titus Andronicus, though that character's tragic fate gave it darker literary overtones. The variant Lovina, softened by the substitution of the more directly affectionate root, flourished particularly among Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish communities in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, where it appears in genealogical records with striking frequency. In these communities, its phonetic resemblance to the word "loving" was surely not accidental — a name that wears its aspiration openly, asking nothing more of a child than that she embody warmth.
Lovina Eicher, an Amish writer and cookbook author whose newspaper column "Lovina's Amish Kitchen" has run for decades, has kept the name gently visible in American culture, giving it a strong association with home cooking, community, and a deliberately unhurried way of life. For contemporary parents, Lovina offers the appeal of a genuinely antique name — uncommon without being invented — with a warm emotional core baked directly into its syllables.