Colleen
About 163,084 American babies have been named Colleen since 1901, most of them around 1964. In 2025 it ranked 2,822nd. About 133,000 Colleens are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 58.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Colleen boys named Colleen
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 163,084
- Estimated living today
- 133,000
- Median age today
- 58
- Peak year
- 1964
- Best rank
- 94th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,822nd
- First recorded
- 1901
- Girls / boys
- 162,754 / 330
How old the living Colleens are
born that year still alive today
Of the 163,084 babies given the name since 1901, about 133,000 are alive — 81 in every hundred. Roughly 2,100 of them are children and 41,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1967 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 English, Irish
From the word colleen, from Irish cailín (“girl”), not used as a name in Ireland. Colleen can also be interpreted as a variant of Coleen, which was a product of marketing by the Hollywood film industry (to promote a new starlet in the 1920s).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Colleens
- Colleen McCullough (1937–2015)Australian author
- Colleen Hoover (born 1979)American author
- Colleen Dewhurst (1924–1991)Canadian-American actress
- Colleen Moore (1900–1988)American actress
- Colleen Ballinger (born 1986)American comedian, singer, actress, writer and media personality
- Colleen Camp (born 1953)American actress and film producer
- Colleen Atwood (born 1948)American costume designer
- Colleen Miller (born 1932)American actress
People named Colleen with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Colleen is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Colleen is most concentrated in Montana (2.3×), Minnesota (2.1×), North Dakota (2.0×), Rhode Island (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1964
The most popular girls’ names the year Colleen peaked:
Colleen elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Colleen | 1,745 | 338th |
| New Zealand girls | Colleen | 1,367 | 43rd |
| Scotland girls | Colleen | 509 | 168th |
| Ireland girls | Colleen | 481 | 205th |
| England and Wales girls | Colleen | 230 | 770th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Colleen | 199 | 103rd |
| Belgium girls | Colleen | 89 | 638th |
| Switzerland girls | Colleen | 37 | 875th |
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.
Colleen: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Colleen | 28 | 0.002% | 739th |
| French girls | Switzerland | Colleen | 9 | 0.002% | 545th |
Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.
Colleen: rank by region
In 2010, Colleen was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wallonia | Colleen | 523 | 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.
Colleen 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 | Colleen | — | 10 |
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
Colleen 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.