Bernard
About 201,070 American babies have been named Bernard since 1880, most of them around 1924. In 2025 it ranked 1,362nd. About 71,000 Bernards are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 65.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Bernard boys named Bernard
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 201,070
- Estimated living today
- 71,000
- Median age today
- 65
- Peak year
- 1924
- Best rank
- 46th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,362nd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 983 / 200,087
How old the living Bernards are
born that year still alive today
Of the 201,070 babies given the name since 1880, about 71,000 are alive — 35 in every hundred. Roughly 2,800 of them are children and 36,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1960 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 Germanic languages
from Old French Bernard, Bernart, from Medieval Latin Bernardus, probably from Frankish *Bernhard (cognate with Old High German Bernhart, Old English Beornheard), from Proto-Germanic *Bernuharduz, equivalent. Popularized by medieval European saints.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Bernards
- George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist
- Bernard of Clairvaux (1091–1153)Burgundian saint, abbot and theologian
- Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976)British Army officer
- Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757)French writer and philosopher of the enlightenment
- Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848)Bohemian mathematician and priest
- Bernard Katz (1911–2003)German-British biophysicist
- Bernard Cazeneuve (born 1963)French prime minister
- Bernard Madoff (1938–2021)American fraudster and financier
People named Bernard with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bernard is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bernard is most concentrated in Vermont (4.0×), the District of Columbia (2.9×), New York (2.0×), Maryland (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1924
The most popular boys’ names the year Bernard peaked:
Bernard elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Bernard | 469,240 | 5th |
| Ireland boys | Bernard | 4,031 | 34th |
| Poland boys | Bernard | 1,191 birth registrations | 137th |
| England and Wales boys | Bernard | 823 | 613th |
| New Zealand boys | Bernard | 657 | 79th |
| Belgium boys | Bernard | 298 | 414th |
| Scotland boys | Bernard | 275 | 112th |
| Norway boys | Bernard | 233 | 199th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Bernard | 82 | 163rd |
| France girls | Bernard | 60 | 1,854th |
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.
Bernard: rank by region
In 2025, Bernard was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Bernard | 642 | 8 |
In 2025, Bernard was given 2 times or more in 9 regions of Poland.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dolnośląskie | Bernard | 144 | 7 |
| Kujawsko-Pomorskie | Bernard | 141 | 3 |
| Łódzkie | Bernard | 158 | 3 |
| Małopolskie | Bernard | 135 | 8 |
| Mazowieckie | Bernard | 119 | 20 |
| Podkarpackie | Bernard | 123 | 4 |
| Śląskie | Bernard | 186 | 4 |
| Wielkopolskie | Bernard | 175 | 5 |
| Zachodniopomorskie | Bernard | 168 | 2 |
In 2021, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Bernard appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (299th).
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.
Bernard 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 | Bernard | 7,910 | 20,323 |
| the Netherlands girls | Bernard | — | 104 |
| Finland boys | Bernard | 35 | 99 |
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 Bernard lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 434 men called Bernard 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alicante/Alacant | Bernard | 55 | 0.055 | 1,217 |
| Almería | Bernard | 17 | 0.043 | 1,358 |
| Girona | Bernard | 16 | 0.038 | 1,517 |
| Málaga | Bernard | 27 | 0.031 | 1,569 |
| Gipuzkoa | Bernard | 11 | 0.031 | 1,457 |
| Tarragona | Bernard | 13 | 0.030 | 1,777 |
Listed in 20 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 32 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
Bernard 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.