From Aramaic 'talitha' meaning 'little girl,' spoken by Jesus in Mark 5:41.
Talitha is an Aramaic word meaning 'little girl' or 'young girl,' preserved in one of the most tender moments in the New Testament. In the Gospel of Mark (5:41), Jesus takes the hand of a twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus and says simply, 'Talitha cumi' — 'Little girl, arise.' The phrase was so vivid that the Greek evangelist left it untranslated, a rare preservation of Jesus's actual spoken language.
This moment of resurrection and intimacy gave the name an almost sacred luminosity across centuries of Christian culture. Beyond Scripture, Talitha gained worldly glamour through Talitha Getty, the Dutch-born bohemian icon who became a symbol of 1960s and 70s counterculture elegance. Her photograph atop a Marrakech rooftop in a gold mini-dress — wind-tossed, radiant — became one of the defining images of that era.
The name carries the echo of that free-spirited beauty even today. In modern naming culture, Talitha occupies a sweet spot between the ancient and the unconventional. It charts in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, where biblical names with unusual sounds find ready audiences, but remains genuinely rare in North America, giving it a sense of discovery for parents seeking something both rooted and unexpected. Its soft, lilting rhythm — three syllables falling gently — gives it an inherently poetic quality.