Marla
name, noun ·2 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Plasticine; modelling clay. Ireland, uncountable
"Miss Carney handed us out blank paper and marla, old plasticine with the colours all rolled together into brown."
- 2 A rufous hare-wallaby (Lagorchestes hirsutus), a small desert marsupial of Australia. Australia
- 3 A unit of area used in the Indian subcontinent, of varying size, but roughly 250 square feet.
- 1 A female given name from Hebrew.
"Marla Rose, a 57-year-old Berwyn resident, told cops that after seeing an online Fuentes post “in regards to women’s rights” that declared, “Your body my choice,” she decided to “record a video” of Fuentes’s Berwyn property."
Example
More examples""Linda, since I was a teenager, I've thought of myself as a lesbian." "Marla, there's such a thing as the Kinsey Scale that measures from zero as strictly heterosexual to six as strictly homosexual. Most people lie in the middle in this zero to six." "That explains why I'm still attracted to some men.""
Etymology
American back-formation from Marlene, first used in the 1930s.
From Irish marla, from Middle English marle. Doublet of marl.
Related phrases
More for "marla"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.