From Welsh rhon meaning lance or the Rhondda Valley in South Wales.
Rhonda takes its name from a place — specifically the Rhondda, a valley in South Wales carved by the river of the same name, whose name in Welsh likely derives from rhonn (lance, spear, or pike) or is related to the word for a noisy or rushing stream. The valley became famous during the industrial revolution as the heart of the South Wales coalfield, its terraced hillside towns synonymous with Welsh mining culture, male choirs, rugby, and a particular nonconformist chapel piety. The name Rhonda is therefore, in one of its readings, a piece of Welsh landscape pressed into personal use.
As a given name, Rhonda was almost entirely an American phenomenon of the twentieth century, popularized in the 1930s and 1940s when Welsh-inflected names carried a certain romantic resonance in English-speaking culture. The Beach Boys accelerated its visibility considerably with their 1965 hit "Help Me, Rhonda," which shot to number one and fixed the name in the pop-cultural memory of an entire generation. For a decade or so afterward, Rhonda felt modern and sun-drenched rather than Welsh and industrial.
By the 1980s the name had peaked, and it now sits in the comfortable middle distance of mid-century American names — not yet vintage enough to feel fresh, but too specific to a historical moment to feel dated in the way that truly archaic names do. In Wales itself, the spelling Rhondda still appears as a given name occasionally, a direct and proud act of geographic identification. Both versions carry the sound of a particular era and a particular attachment to place.