Alexander

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Alexander boys named Alexander

By the numbers

Total US births

740,668

Estimated living today

676,000

Median age today

24

Peak year

1993

Best rank

21st

Rank in 2025

30th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

4,545 / 736,123

How old the living Alexanders are

born that year still alive today

Of the 740,668 babies given the name since 1880, about 676,000 are alive — 91 in every hundred. Roughly 229,000 of them are children and 15,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2001 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 Ancient Greek

from Ancient Greek Ἀλέξανδρος, from ἀλέξω (“to defend”) + ἀνδρ-, the stem of ἀνήρ (“man”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Alexanders

• Alexander the Great (355 BC–322 BC)king of Macedonia and conqueror of Achaemenid Persia (356–323 BC)
• Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837)Russian poet, playwright, and novelist
• Alexander Lukashenka (born 1954)President of the Republic of Belarus
• Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer
• Alexander Fleming (1881–1955)Scottish biologist, pharmacologist, botanist, and Nobel laureate
• Alexander Pope (1688–1744)English poet
• Alexander I of Russia (1777–1825)The tenth Emperor of Russia
• William Alexander of the Netherlands (born 1967)King of the Netherlands

People named Alexander with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Alexander is most common

• CA103,274
• NY61,505
• TX50,429
• FL41,100
• IL37,740
• PA33,351
• OH28,167
• NJ27,153
• MI25,583
• MA21,975

Relative to how many babies each state records, Alexander is most concentrated in Nevada (2.1×), Alaska (1.7×), Florida (1.6×), Arizona (1.5×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1993

The most popular boys’ names the year Alexander peaked:

• Michael
• Christopher
• Matthew
• Joshua
• Tyler
• Brandon

All the names of 1993

Alexander elsewhere

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.

Alexander: births by region

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, Alexander is most concentrated in Zug, where 0.46% of children were given it – 125 of them.

Alexander: rank by region

In 2025, Alexander was given 5 times or more in 2 regions of Belgium.

In 2024, Alexander was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Alexander was given 2 times or more in 16 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Alexander appears in the lists for Province of Flemish Brabant (16th), Province of Limburg (24th), Province of Antwerp (27th), Province of East Flanders (52nd), Brussels-Capital Region (79th) and Province of West Flanders (121st).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, 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.

Alexander by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Alexander 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.

Among boys in Finland this is mostly a middle name: of the 16,592 who carry it, 3,324 go by it.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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 Alexander lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 17,900 men called Alexander 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

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

• Alexis
• Alex
• Alexandra
• Alejandro
• Alexa
• Alexandria
• Alec
• Alejandra
• Alexia
• Alessandra
• Alexus
• Aleah

Alexander against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Alexander vs Alexis
• Alexander vs Alex
• Alexander vs Alexandra
• Alexander vs Alejandro
• Alexander vs Alexa
• Alexander vs Alexandria

Compare Alexander with a name of your own