Clive
About 3,336 American babies have been named Clive since 1885, most of them around 2016. In 2025 it ranked 2,390th. About 2,200 Clives are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 16.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Clive
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 3,336
- Estimated living today
- 2,200
- Median age today
- 16
- Peak year
- 2016
- Best rank
- 1,788th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,390th
- First recorded
- 1885
How old the living Clives are
born that year still alive today
Of the 3,336 babies given the name since 1885, about 2,200 are alive — 66 in every hundred. Roughly 1,200 of them are children and 330 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2009 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 Clives
- Clive Owen (born 1964)English actor
- Clive Dunn (1920–2012)British actor
- Clive Granger (1934–2009)British economist
- Clive Barker (born 1952)English author, film director, and visual artist
- Clive Sinclair (1940–2021)English entrepreneur and inventor
- Clive Cussler (1931–2020)American novelist
- Clive Burr (1957–2013)English drummer
- Clive Davis (1932–2026)American music executive
People named Clive with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Clive is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Clive is most concentrated in New York (4.8×), California (2.8×), Washington (2.5×), Texas (1.6×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2016
The most popular boys’ names the year Clive peaked:
Clive elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland boys | Clive | 804 | 111th |
| England and Wales boys | Clive | 225 | 788th |
| Scotland boys | Clive | 38 | 197th |
| France boys | Clive | 15 | 3,575th |
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.
Clive 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 | Clive | — | 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
Clive 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.