Clair
About 16,351 American babies have been named Clair since 1880, most of them around 1923. It is given to both boys and girls. It has not appeared in the national data since 2025. About 5,500 Clairs are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 59.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Clair boys named Clair
Girls and boys called Clair
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Clair crossed from boys to girls in 1975, and has stayed there for 50 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 100% girls, which is roughly where it still is.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 136 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 16,351
- Estimated living today
- 5,500
- Median age today
- 59
- Peak year
- 1923
- Best rank
- 295th
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 4,310 / 12,041
How old the living Clairs are
born that year still alive today
Of the 16,351 babies given the name since 1880, about 5,500 are alive — 34 in every hundred. Roughly 730 of them are children and 2,400 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1966 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 French
A less common spelling of Claire.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Clairs
- Clair Cameron Patterson (1922–1995)American chemist and geochemist
- Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948)American statistician
People named Clair with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Clair is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Clair is most concentrated in Pennsylvania (8.8×), Utah (6.0×), Iowa (4.9×), South Dakota (3.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1923
The most popular boys’ names the year Clair peaked:
Clair elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Clair | 940 | 298th |
| Scotland girls | Clair | 598 | 130th |
| Ireland girls | Clair | 307 | 243rd |
| England and Wales girls | Clair | 35 | 2,023rd |
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.
Clair 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 girls | Clair | — | 5 |
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
Clair 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.