Makayla is a modern American spelling of Michaela, the feminine form of Michael, and means "who is like God?", a rhetorical question from the Hebrew. The phonetic spelling took off in the 1990s together with Kayla and Mikayla and was for a while the most popular of the group. In the United States Makayla was a top 100 name at number 67 in 2000 and peaked at number 37 in 2008, but has fallen steadily since, to number 568 among girls' names in 2025.