Boston
Boston reached its high-water mark in 2014 at number 555, and has been recorded 11,944 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 620th. About 11,000 Bostons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 11.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Boston boys named Boston
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 11,944
- Estimated living today
- 11,000
- Median age today
- 11
- Peak year
- 2014
- Best rank
- 555th
- Rank in 2025
- 620th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 1,043 / 10,901
How old the living Bostons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 11,944 babies given the name since 1880, about 11,000 are alive — 96 in every hundred. Roughly 8,900 of them are children and 70 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2014 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 a place name, a surname
The US city is named after the English town (from which several prominent colonists had come), which itself is sometimes said to be named as a contraction of Botolph's town or Botolph's stone (the name Botolph itself coming from Old English Botwulf, from boda + wulf). However, this is uncertain.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Bostons
- Boston Corbett (1832–1894)Union Army sergeant
People named Boston with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Boston is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Boston is most concentrated in Utah (22.7×), Idaho (7.2×), Oklahoma (4.4×), Arizona (2.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2014
The most popular boys’ names the year Boston peaked:
Boston elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Boston | 190 | 1,448th |
| France boys | Boston | 110 | 4,944th |
| Ireland boys | Boston | 7 | 646th |
| Scotland boys | Boston | 6 | 703rd |
| Northern Ireland boys | Boston | 3 | 398th |
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.
Boston 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Boston | — | 6 |
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.
Related names
Boston 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.