Bernadette
Bernadette reached its high-water mark in 1958 at number 213, and has been recorded 55,033 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,034th. About 38,000 Bernadettes are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 61.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Bernadette boys named Bernadette
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 55,033
- Estimated living today
- 38,000
- Median age today
- 61
- Peak year
- 1958
- Best rank
- 213th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,034th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 54,973 / 60
How old the living Bernadettes are
born that year still alive today
Of the 55,033 babies given the name since 1880, about 38,000 are alive — 70 in every hundred. Roughly 2,600 of them are children and 16,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1964 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 French
From made famous by St. Bernadette of Lourdes.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Bernadettes
- Bernadette Soubirous (1844–1879)French saint
- Bernadette Peters (born 1948)American actress and singer
- Bernadette Lafont (1938–2013)French actress
- Bernadette Meehan (born 1975)Wikimedia CEO and American diplomat
- Bernadette Chirac (1933–2026)French politician
- Bernadette Szőcs (born 1995)Romanian table tennis player
- Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (born 1947)Irish socialist and republican political activist
- Bernadette Schild (born 1990)Austrian alpine skier
People named Bernadette with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bernadette is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bernadette is most concentrated in New Mexico (4.9×), Hawaii (4.9×), Pennsylvania (2.6×), New Jersey (2.2×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1958
The most popular girls’ names the year Bernadette peaked:
Bernadette elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Bernadette | 141,455 | 16th |
| Ireland girls | Bernadette | 5,642 | 12th |
| England and Wales girls | Bernadette | 497 | 620th |
| Scotland girls | Bernadette | 394 | 159th |
| Italy girls | Bernadette | 366 | — |
| Austria girls | Bernadette | 191 | 59th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Bernadette | 23 | 291st |
| Poland girls | Bernadette | 2 birth registrations | 711th |
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.
Bernadette 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 girls | Bernadette | 4,517 | 15,859 |
| the Netherlands boys | Bernadette | — | 267 |
| Finland girls | Bernadette | 10 | 37 |
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 Bernadette lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 356 women called Bernadette were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Women: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Girona | Bernadette | 17 | 0.041 | 1,458 |
| Alicante/Alacant | Bernadette | 40 | 0.039 | 1,574 |
| Barcelona | Bernadette | 82 | 0.027 | 1,805 |
| Palmas, Las | Bernadette | 16 | 0.027 | 2,679 |
| Málaga | Bernadette | 22 | 0.024 | 1,905 |
| Balears, Illes | Bernadette | 14 | 0.022 | 2,285 |
Listed in 15 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 37 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
Bernadette 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.