Lerato is a Sesotho and Setswana name meaning "love." It is used across South Africa, Lesotho, and Botswana — and is a name often given to daughters as a direct expression of the family's love for the child.
Lerato is one of the most popular girl's names in southern Africa and is increasingly used by African diaspora families in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. Three syllables, a meaning that needs no translation.
Lerato does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
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In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Lerato reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.