From Latin/Greek 'zona' meaning girdle or belt; used as a literary name.
Zona carries twin etymological streams. Its most direct root is the Greek zone, meaning belt, girdle, or band — a term used in classical geography for the latitudinal zones of the earth (torrid, temperate, frigid) and in anatomy for banded structures. From this root the word "zone" entered every European language.
As a given name, Zona has a crisp, geographic quality that would have felt modern and learned to 19th-century American parents, part of the same vogue for classical-sounding names that produced Cora, Flora, and Nora. The name's most distinguished American bearer is Zona Gale, the Wisconsin novelist and playwright born in 1874, who in 1921 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for her stage adaptation of her novel "Miss Lulu Bett." Gale was a prominent figure in the Progressive Era — a suffragist, pacifist, and fierce advocate for women's professional equality — and her name appeared regularly in newspapers for three decades.
Her achievement gave Zona a specific cultural resonance in the Midwest, where the name was already in modest circulation. It appears in American census records most consistently between 1880 and 1930, concentrated in the Midwest and South. There is also a phonetic association with Arizona — the place name itself derived from the O'odham word for "small spring" — that may have contributed to the name's American appeal in the West, where the landscape was constantly generating new naming fashions. Today Zona occupies genuinely rare territory: old enough to be an heirloom, short enough to feel modern, carrying the quiet distinction of a name most people have never met in person but immediately recognize as real.