How many people share your name?

It is one of the most natural questions to ask about yourself: how many people share my name? The answer says something about how common or rare you are, where in the world your name belongs, and how it has travelled through generations. This tool turns that curiosity into a real number. Type any first name, surname, or full "First Last" combination and we return an estimate of how many living people carry it, along with the data behind that figure.

Behind every result is more than a century of official birth records. In the United States that means the Social Security Administration's name files, which run from 1880 to the present. In the United Kingdom it is the Office for National Statistics; in Canada, provincial vital-statistics registries; in Australia and New Zealand, the state births registries and the Department of Internal Affairs. Surname counts come from national censuses, including the U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 surname file. We combine these sources, adjust historical births by age-specific survival rates, and arrive at an estimate of how many bearers are alive today rather than how many were ever born.

A single number is only the start. Each name page breaks the figure down so you can understand it in context. You see the worldwide bearer estimate and a global rank, then a "1 in X people" rarity score that translates the count into something intuitive. A name held by 1 in 800 people feels very different from one held by 1 in 50,000, even though both are just numbers on their own.

You also see the gender split, the year-by-year popularity curve from 1880 onward, a decade-by-decade summary, the country-by-country distribution, and, in the United States, a state-level breakdown. For surnames you get the origin and meaning plus the first names most commonly paired with that last name. Famous bearers, linked from Wikidata, round out the picture so a name is connected to the real people who carry it.

Rarity is relative. A name can be vanishingly rare in one country and ordinary in another, which is why a worldwide view matters. We express rarity two ways: as a global rank among every name we track, and as a per-capita probability within a country. A name in the top 100 is something you will meet often; a name ranked beyond 50,000 is one most people will never encounter. Spelling matters too. Variant spellings each count separately, so "Catherine", "Katherine", and "Kathryn" tell three different stories even though they sound alike.

If you want to explore the extremes, browse the most popular names and the rarest names, or see which names are rising and falling right now.

No name stays still. The popularity curves on this site reflect real cultural forces. Television, film, and music push names up almost overnight: a single beloved character or chart-topping artist can lift a name from obscurity into the top ranks within a couple of years. Generational recycling pulls names back from the past, which is why names that felt dated to one generation feel fresh and vintage to the next, returning on a roughly 100-year cycle.

Migration reshapes the map continuously, carrying names across borders and blending naming traditions. And there is a quieter, personal force at work: once a name becomes very common, some parents deliberately avoid it, which caps its growth and eventually sends it back down. You can watch all of these patterns play out across the decades, from the 1950s to the 2020s, or grouped by language of origin.

The same question applies to every part of your name. A first name tells you about a generation and a trend. A surname tells you about a family line, an occupation, or a place your ancestors came from. Put them together and a full-name combination becomes far rarer than either part alone, which is why a "First Last" search usually returns a much smaller estimate. It is the closest this tool comes to answering "how many people are exactly me?"

Expecting parents use it to test how common a shortlisted name already is. Genealogists and family historians use surname distribution to trace where a family line concentrated. Writers and game designers use it to pick names that feel real for a given era. Researchers, journalists, and the simply curious use it to settle a question in seconds. Whatever brings you here, the answer is only as good as its sources.

That is why every figure on this site is cited. We are an independent project and are not affiliated with any government agency. Where a country has a primary source we report it directly; where it does not, we estimate from prevalence in reference countries and flag the value clearly so you always know what is measured and what is modelled. The full source list and the survival-rate method are documented on our methodology page.