Variant of Lydia, from Greek meaning woman from Lydia, an ancient kingdom in Asia Minor.
Lyda is a streamlined variant of Lydia, one of the ancient world's most geographically evocative names. Lydia was the name of a prosperous kingdom in western Asia Minor — present-day Turkey — whose Lydian civilization is credited with inventing coinage in the 7th century BCE under the legendary King Croesus, whose name became synonymous with wealth. To bear a Lydian name was, in the ancient imagination, to carry a hint of mercantile sophistication and Eastern luxury.
The name entered Christian tradition through the Acts of the Apostles, where Lydia of Thyatira appears as a "seller of purple" cloth — a high-status trade — who became the first recorded European convert to Christianity when the Apostle Paul baptized her and her household in Philippi around 50 CE. That early Christian pedigree gave the name respectability throughout European Christendom, and it appeared steadily in baptismal records from the medieval period onward. Lyda, the shortened form, became particularly common in 19th-century America, where it carried all of Lydia's elegance with a frontier informality.
The form Lyda was especially visible in the American Midwest and South during the 1880s and 1890s, part of a cohort of -a ending feminines that felt both classical and approachable. Today Lyda reads as a compelling antique — rarer than Lydia, more direct, with the slightly compressed energy of a name that doesn't need all its letters to make an impression. It sits in the same quiet register as Lena, Cora, and Ada, names that the current revival of 19th-century styles has returned to fashion.