Alfred
Alfred reached its high-water mark in 1928 at number 33, and has been recorded 245,153 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 840th. About 83,000 Alfreds are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 64.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Alfred boys named Alfred
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 245,153
- Estimated living today
- 83,000
- Median age today
- 64
- Peak year
- 1928
- Best rank
- 33rd
- Rank in 2025
- 840th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 1,292 / 243,861
How old the living Alfreds are
born that year still alive today
Of the 245,153 babies given the name since 1880, about 83,000 are alive — 34 in every hundred. Roughly 4,600 of them are children and 42,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1961 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 Old English
From Middle English Alfred, from Old English Ælfrǣd. Equivalent to elf + rede.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Alfreds
- Alfred Nobel (1833–1896)Swedish chemist and inventor
- Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)British filmmaker
- Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)British Poet Laureate
- Alfred Adler (1870–1937)Austrian psychotherapist
- Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913)British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist
- Alfred the Great (849–899)king of Wessex (r. 872–901)
- Alfred de Musset (1810–1857)French writer
- Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)English mathematician and philosopher
People named Alfred with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Alfred is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Alfred is most concentrated in Rhode Island (3.4×), Hawaii (2.4×), Massachusetts (2.2×), New York (1.7×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1928
The most popular boys’ names the year Alfred peaked:
Alfred elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Alfred | 65,910 | 28th |
| England and Wales boys | Alfred | 13,182 | 80th |
| Sweden boys | Alfred | 9,602 | 13th |
| Denmark boys | Alfred | 6,560 | 2nd |
| Norway boys | Alfred | 3,474 | 18th |
| Ireland boys | Alfred | 338 | 271st |
| Scotland boys | Alfred | 314 | 225th |
| Belgium boys | Alfred | 123 | 566th |
| Switzerland boys | Alfred | 100 | 659th |
| Poland boys | Alfred | 61 birth registrations | 322nd |
| Northern Ireland boys | Alfred | 59 | 262nd |
| France girls | Alfred | 20 | 2,001st |
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.
Alfred: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Alfred | 69 | 0.006% | 663rd |
| French boys | Switzerland | Alfred | 28 | 0.006% | 427th |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Alfred | 2 | 0.003% | 180th |
| Romansh boys | Switzerland | Alfred | 1 | 0.027% | 15th |
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, Alfred is most concentrated in Zurich, where 0.01% of children were given it – 30 of them.
Alfred: rank by region
In 2025, Alfred was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Alfred | 429 | 13 |
In 2025, Alfred was given 2 times or more in 1 region of Poland.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Małopolskie | Alfred | 203 | 3 |
In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Alfred appears in the lists for Province of East Flanders (264th).
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.
Alfred by city
| City | Years | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin boys | 2017–2023 | 85 | 159th |
One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.
Alfred 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| the Netherlands boys | Alfred | 4,918 | 7,674 |
| Finland boys | Alfred | 492 | 3,150 |
| the Netherlands girls | Alfred | — | 97 |
Among boys in Finland this is mostly a middle name: of the 3,150 who carry it, 492 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 Alfred lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 1,048 men called Alfred 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 | Alfred | 125 | 0.285 | 352 |
| Lleida | Alfred | 42 | 0.178 | 500 |
| Barcelona | Alfred | 461 | 0.158 | 474 |
| Girona | Alfred | 64 | 0.154 | 555 |
| Valencia/València | Alfred | 95 | 0.070 | 900 |
| Alicante/Alacant | Alfred | 57 | 0.057 | 1,182 |
Listed in 19 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 33 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
Alfred 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.