Cecil
About 114,676 American babies have been named Cecil since 1880, most of them around 1920. In 2025 it ranked 1,486th. About 35,000 Cecils are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 66.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Cecil boys named Cecil
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 114,676
- Estimated living today
- 35,000
- Median age today
- 66
- Peak year
- 1920
- Best rank
- 77th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,486th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 7,687 / 106,989
How old the living Cecils are
born that year still alive today
Of the 114,676 babies given the name since 1880, about 35,000 are alive — 31 in every hundred. Roughly 1,900 of them are children and 19,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1959 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 Latin
From Latin Caecilius, a Roman family name derived from caecus (“blind”). The surname has absorbed the owl Seisyllt, from Latin Sextilius, from Sextus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Cecils
- Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902)British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa
- Cecil Frank Powell (1903–1969)British physicist
- Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959)American film director, producer and actor
- Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959)British economist
- Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972)Irish-born British poet
- Cecil Beaton (1904–1980)British photographer, designer, socialite, writer
- Cecil Taylor (1929–2018)American jazz pianist and poet
- Cecil Kellaway (1890–1973)South African actor
People named Cecil with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Cecil is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Cecil is most concentrated in Oklahoma (3.5×), West Virginia (3.5×), Arkansas (3.4×), Kentucky (3.2×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1920
The most popular boys’ names the year Cecil peaked:
Cecil elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Cecil +1 spelling | 170 | 4,640th |
| England and Wales boys | Cecil | 98 | 2,318th |
| Ireland boys | Cecil | 86 | 219th |
| Ireland girls | Cecil | 5 | 300th |
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.
Cecil 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 | Cecil | 12 | 34 |
| Finland girls | Cecil | 5 | 9 |
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
Cecil 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.