Variant of Tallulah, a Native American Choctaw place name meaning 'leaping water,' popularized in English culture.
Talullah is an alternate spelling of Tallulah, a name of Choctaw origin meaning "leaping water" or "rushing water" — a vivid, kinetic image from the indigenous peoples of the American Southeast. The name's most famous geographic anchor is Tallulah Falls in northeastern Georgia, where the Tallulah River drops nearly five hundred feet through a dramatic gorge that drew Victorian tourists and later daredevil tightrope walkers. The name entered American consciousness through this landscape: wild, beautiful, geographically specific, and impossible to forget.
Its most celebrated human bearer is the actress Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968), the Alabama-born stage and screen star whose flamboyant wit, fearless performances, and larger-than-life personality made her a defining figure of the Broadway golden age and a legendary figure in American cultural history. Bankhead — named after her paternal grandmother, who was named after the falls — embodied the name's wild-water energy completely. Her wit was quotable, her style incomparable, and her influence on subsequent generations of performers ran deep.
The spelling Talullah softens the name slightly, removing one L in the middle, giving it a more lyrical visual rhythm. The name returned to broader use in the late twentieth century partly through Bankhead's enduring fame and partly through a broader revival of distinctive Americana names. Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall named a daughter Tallulah in 1989, and subsequent celebrity choices kept it in the cultural conversation. Today, in either spelling, Talullah carries a sense of dramatic landscape, Southern Gothic atmosphere, and theatrical confidence — a name with a waterfall inside it.