Humanverse

Carlyle

About 4,071 American babies have been named Carlyle since 1892, most of them around 1918. In 2025 it ranked 4,857th. About 1,700 Carlyles are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 43.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 30 60 90 120 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Carlyle boys named Carlyle

By the numbers

Total US births
4,071
Estimated living today
1,700
Median age today
43
Peak year
1918
Best rank
564th
Rank in 2025
4,857th
First recorded
1892
Girls / boys
215 / 3,856

How old the living Carlyles are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 30 60 90 120 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 4,071 babies given the name since 1892, about 1,700 are alive — 41 in every hundred. Roughly 390 of them are children and 520 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1982 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 surname

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Carlyles

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

Where Carlyle is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Carlyle is most concentrated in Iowa (4.2×), Virginia (4.2×), North Carolina (4.1×), Minnesota (3.7×).

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

Names of 1918

The most popular boys’ names the year Carlyle peaked:

All the names of 1918

Carlyle elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
England and Wales boys Carlyle 6 4,678th

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

Carlyle against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

Compare Carlyle with a name of your own

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.