Alan
About 364,389 American babies have been named Alan since 1882, most of them around 1955. In 2025 it ranked 191st. About 270,000 Alans are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 55.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Alan boys named Alan
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 364,389
- Estimated living today
- 270,000
- Median age today
- 55
- Peak year
- 1955
- Best rank
- 43rd
- Rank in 2025
- 191st
- First recorded
- 1882
- Girls / boys
- 1,076 / 363,313
How old the living Alans are
born that year still alive today
Of the 364,389 babies given the name since 1882, about 270,000 are alive — 74 in every hundred. Roughly 42,000 of them are children and 90,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1970 and half after.
An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.
Where the name comes from
Origin Celtic languages
From obt Alan, name of early Breton saints, of disputed origin and meaning; brought to England by Normans. It may have been the name of a Celtic deity, the brother of Bran, Welsh Alawn, Alun. As an early Irish name, perhaps connected with ail (“noble”). Compare French Alain.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Alans
- Alan Turing (1912–1954)English computer scientist
- Alan Rickman (1946–2016)British actor and director
- Alan Shearer (born 1970)English footballer
- Alan García (1949–2019)President of Peru (1985–1990 and 2006–2011)
- Alan Arkin (1934–2023)American actor, filmmaker
- Alan Shepard (1923–1998)American astronaut, first American in space, lunar explorer
- Alan Moore (born 1953)British comic book author
- Alan Greenspan (1926–2026)American economist and financial advisor
People named Alan with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Alan is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Alan is most concentrated in Hawaii (2.1×), Vermont (1.7×), Rhode Island (1.5×), Maine (1.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1955
The most popular boys’ names the year Alan peaked:
Alan elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poland boys | Alan | 47,176 birth registrations | 20th |
| France boys | Alan +1 spelling | 21,105 | 87th |
| Ireland boys | Alan | 19,656 | 9th |
| Scotland boys | Alan | 11,176 | 13th |
| New Zealand boys | Alan | 5,689 | 15th |
| England and Wales boys | Alan | 5,470 | 170th |
| Spain boys | Alan | 3,283 | 82nd |
| Italy boys | Alan | 2,196 | — |
| Belgium boys | Alan | 1,108 | 150th |
| Switzerland boys | Alan | 924 | 148th |
| Norway boys | Alan | 875 | 184th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Alan | 332 | 107th |
Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.
Alan: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Alan | 387 | 0.031% | 241st |
| French boys | Switzerland | Alan | 427 | 0.098% | 54th |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Alan | 110 | 0.169% | 33rd |
Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.
By canton, Alan is most concentrated in Jura, where 0.21% of children were given it – 30 of them.
Alan: rank by region
In 2025, Alan was given 5 times or more in 2 regions of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Alan | 464 | 12 |
| Wallonia | Alan | 356 | 7 |
In 2025, Alan was given 2 times or more in 16 regions of Poland.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dolnośląskie | Alan | 55 | 37 |
| Kujawsko-Pomorskie | Alan | 41 | 37 |
| Lubelskie | Alan | 45 | 28 |
| Lubuskie | Alan | 49 | 13 |
| Łódzkie | Alan | 45 | 37 |
| Małopolskie | Alan | 51 | 53 |
| Mazowieckie | Alan | 66 | 58 |
| Opolskie | Alan | 41 | 17 |
| Podkarpackie | Alan | 49 | 30 |
| Podlaskie | Alan | 78 | 6 |
| Pomorskie | Alan | 70 | 24 |
| Śląskie | Alan | 56 | 50 |
| Świętokrzyskie | Alan | 33 | 20 |
| Warmińsko-Mazurskie | Alan | 44 | 19 |
| Wielkopolskie | Alan | 54 | 45 |
| Zachodniopomorskie | Alan | 60 | 15 |
In 2024, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Alan appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (345th).
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.
Alan by city
| City | Years | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin boys | 2017–2023 | 73 | 226th |
One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.
Alan among the living
How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Alan | 170 | 348 |
| Finland girls | Alan | — | 7 |
A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.
Where Alan lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 9,342 men called Alan were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Men: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tarragona | Alan | 381 | 0.869 | 173 |
| Barcelona | Alan | 2,180 | 0.747 | 170 |
| Alicante/Alacant | Alan | 657 | 0.653 | 175 |
| Lleida | Alan | 143 | 0.607 | 207 |
| Girona | Alan | 237 | 0.569 | 215 |
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Alan | 271 | 0.508 | 234 |
Listed in 51 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 1 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.
Related names
Alan against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.