Bessie
The girl's name Bessie has been in the national records since 1880, with 170,877 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 6,838th. About 21,000 Bessies are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 77.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Bessie boys named Bessie
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 170,877
- Estimated living today
- 21,000
- Median age today
- 77
- Peak year
- 1916
- Best rank
- 56th
- Rank in 2025
- 6,838th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 170,140 / 737
How old the living Bessies are
born that year still alive today
Of the 170,877 babies given the name since 1880, about 21,000 are alive — 12 in every hundred. Roughly 220 of them are children and 16,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1948 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 Bessies
- Bessie Smith (1894–1937)American blues singer
- Bessie Coleman (1892–1926)American aviator
- Bessie Love (1898–1986)American actress
- Bessie Emery Head (1937–1986)South African born Botswanan writer and teacher
- Bessie Barriscale (1884–1965)American silent film and stage actress
- Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925)British writer, editor
- Bessie Eyton (1890–1965)actress
- Bessie Braddock (1899–1970)British Labour politician
People named Bessie with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bessie is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bessie is most concentrated in Mississippi (5.5×), Alabama (3.9×), South Carolina (3.7×), Arkansas (2.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1916
The most popular girls’ names the year Bessie peaked:
Bessie elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Bessie | 456 | 1,094th |
| France girls | Bessie | 10 | 4,990th |
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.
Related names
Bessie 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.