Bao

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Bao boys named Bao

Girls and boys called Bao

years more girls than boys years more boys than girls

Both, throughout, without either side ever taking it over: 580 girls and 850 boys in all, and in 1998 the split was 16 to 13.

The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 19 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.

By the numbers

Total US births

1,430

Estimated living today

1,400

Median age today

33

Peak year

1986

Best rank

1,917th

Rank in 2025

7,679th

First recorded

1976

Girls / boys

580 / 850

How old the living Baos are

born that year still alive today

Of the 1,430 babies given the name since 1976, about 1,400 are alive — 97 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1992 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.

Notable Baos

• Bao Tong (1932–2022)Policy secretary of former CCP general secretary & Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang
• Bao Chunlai (born 1983)Chinese badminton player
• Zhang Bao (200–184)Yellow Turban leader
• Bao Xin (152–192)Han dynasty general and warlord

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

Where Bao is most common

• CA426
• MN83
• WI37
• TX21

Relative to how many babies each state records, Bao is most concentrated in Minnesota (7.9×), California (7.4×), Wisconsin (3.2×), Texas (0.5×).

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

Names of 1986

The most popular boys’ names the year Bao peaked:

• Michael
• Christopher
• Matthew
• Joshua
• David
• Daniel

All the names of 1986

Bao 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.

Bao: 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.

Bao by city

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

Bao 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.

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.