Word.ws English Dictionary

Luca

/ˈluːkə/

Luca proper noun: a male given name from Italian, borrowed in the 2000s. Also the alternative letter-case form of LUCA.

Proper noun

Luca

  1. A male given name from Italian, borrowed in the 2000s.
  2. A female given name.
    • This is my bedroom, and Luca’s, and Fran’s, and my mother’s. The four of us sleep here, and at the back of the house live Celesta and Rose, my other two sisters who I don’t really know. […] We are Celesta, Rosaria, Francesca, Luca, Dolores.2000, Trezza Azzopardi, “Waiting”, in The Hiding Place, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Atlantic Monthly Press, published 2001, →ISBN, page 4
    • Miss Lori, my girlfriend is on the phone. Her name is Luca.2014 June 16, Luciana Craita, “Black Alpha”, in Luca the Werewolf Daughter, [Bloomington, Ind.]: Xlibris, →ISBN, page 74

Noun capitalized: LUCA

LUCA (plural LUCAs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of last universal common ancestor; the hypothesised most recent primordial organism that is an ancestor to all organisms now living.
    • Luca is now usually placed deep underground, in a fissure in hot igneous rocks, where she fed on sulphur, iron, hydrogen and carbon.1999, Matt Ridley, Genome, Harper Perennial, published 2000, page 19
    • It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants[…].2011 November 26, Michael Marshall, “Our ancestor, the mega-organism”, in New Scientist, page 8
    Synonyms:
    LUA

Also used as

Luca is also the alternative letter-case form of LUCA.

Synonyms of Luca

Forms of Luca

pluralLucas
pluralLUCAs
alternative formLuca
alternative formL.U.C.A.
alternative formL. U. C. A.

Origin of Luca

Borrowed from Italian Luca, from Latin Lūcās, from Ancient Greek Λουκᾶς (Loukâs), hypocoristic of Λούκιος (Loúkios) (from Latin Lūcius m) or Λουκανός (Loukanós) or both with -ᾶς (-âs). As a female given name, used in Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian as an equivalent of Lucy (ultimately of same origin, from Latin Lūcia f), but English usage is influenced by the male given name, similar Lucas, Luke, and the feminine ending -a.

Words that rhyme with Luca

Questions about Luca

What does Luca mean?
Luca means a male given name from Italian, borrowed in the 2000s.
What part of speech is Luca?
Luca can be a proper noun or a noun.
How do you pronounce Luca?
Luca is pronounced /ˈluːkə/.

Words near Luca in the dictionary

  1. Lubusz Voivodeship
  2. Luby
  3. Lubys
  4. Luc-sur-Mer
  5. Luc.
  6. Luca
  7. lucabindiite
  8. lucam
  9. lucams
  10. Lucan
  11. Lucania

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Luca (page history and authors); LUCA (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Luca.wav.

Cite this entry: “Luca.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/luca. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.