Variant of Winona, from Dakota Sioux meaning 'firstborn daughter.'
Winnona is a variant spelling of Winona, a name drawn from the Lakota and Dakota Sioux languages, where "Winúŋna" designates the firstborn daughter. The naming practice it reflects — giving children birth-order names — was common across many Indigenous Plains cultures and speaks to a worldview in which a child's place in the family order is understood as a defining, honoring fact rather than mere chronological accident. To name a girl Winona is to mark her as the one who arrived first, the one who made her parents parents.
The name entered the American geographical record most prominently through Winona, Minnesota, a city on the Mississippi River named for a legendary Dakota woman, Wenonah, whose story — of a young woman who leapt from a cliff rather than accept an arranged marriage — was popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), in which Wenonah appears as the mother of the hero. Longfellow's poem gave the name a romantic, tragic American mythology that made it fashionable among non-Indigenous families throughout the late nineteenth century. The variant spelling Winnona — with its doubled 'n' — adds a visual softness while preserving the name's sonic identity.
Actress Winona Ryder, born in the city of Winona, brought the name back into public consciousness in the 1990s. Today Winnona offers parents a name with genuine Indigenous American roots, a literary pedigree, and a distinctiveness that its more common spelling doesn't quite achieve — each element grounding it in something larger than a single family's private choice.