Chesney
Chesney reached its high-water mark in 2005 at number 1,553, and has been recorded 2,821 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 2,778th. About 2,800 Chesneys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 17.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Chesney boys named Chesney
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,821
- Estimated living today
- 2,800
- Median age today
- 17
- Peak year
- 2005
- Best rank
- 1,553rd
- Rank in 2025
- 2,778th
- First recorded
- 1970
- Girls / boys
- 2,664 / 157
How old the living Chesneys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,821 babies given the name since 1970, about 2,800 are alive — 99 in every hundred. Roughly 1,400 of them are children and 0 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2008 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
From Norman place names meaning “oak grove” (cognate to French chênaie), from Picard quesne, from Vulgar Latin *cassanus, probably from cel-gau kassanos (“oak”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Chesneys
- Chesney Hawkes (born 1971)British singer
People named Chesney with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Chesney is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Chesney is most concentrated in Tennessee (7.8×), North Carolina (4.2×), Texas (3.7×), Oklahoma (2.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2005
The most popular girls’ names the year Chesney peaked:
Chesney elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Belgium boys | Chesney | 50 | 578th |
| England and Wales boys | Chesney | 48 | 1,456th |
| England and Wales girls | Chesney | 24 | 2,165th |
| Ireland boys | Chesney | 3 | 506th |
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.
Chesney: rank by region
In 2001, Chesney was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Chesney | 715 | 5 |
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Related names
Chesney 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.