From Old Norse meaning rough isle, or a Scottish island name; also a feminine form of Ronald.
Rona is a name of quietly competing origins, each lending it a different character. In Scottish Gaelic tradition, Rona (or Ronaidh) is associated with the small island of Rona off the northern coast of Scotland — a remote, dramatic place of storm-lashed beauty that has inspired folklore for centuries. The island's name may derive from the Old Norse *hraun-ey*, meaning "rough island," and in Scottish oral tradition Rona is populated by seals who shed their skins to walk as humans, the selkies of Celtic mythology.
To bear the name in a Scottish context is to carry a hint of the sea and the otherworldly. Rona also functions as a feminine form of Ronald or Ronan. Ronan is an Old Irish name meaning "little seal" (*rón* + diminutive *-an*), which elegantly loops back to the selkie mythology.
Ronald itself comes from the Old Norse *Rögnvaldr*, combining *regin* ("counsel, decision") and *valdr* ("ruler") — making Rona, at some linguistic distance, a bearer of meaning close to "wise ruler." In Hebrew, *Rona* or *Roni* means "my joy" or "song of joy," and the name is used in modern Israel in that spirit. Rona enjoyed modest usage through the mid-20th century in Britain and the Commonwealth, where it had a crisp, no-nonsense elegance.
It briefly gained notoriety in 2020 as an inadvertent homophone for the colloquial shortening of a global pandemic, a piece of bad timing that has since faded. What remains is a name with genuine Celtic beauty, seal-mythology depth, and a compact two-syllable sound that ages effortlessly from childhood to adulthood.