Cornelius
About 37,049 American babies have been named Cornelius since 1880, most of them around 1974. In 2025 it ranked 1,906th. About 20,000 Corneliuses are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 45.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Cornelius boys named Cornelius
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 37,049
- Estimated living today
- 20,000
- Median age today
- 45
- Peak year
- 1974
- Best rank
- 346th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,906th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 642 / 36,407
How old the living Corneliuses are
born that year still alive today
Of the 37,049 babies given the name since 1880, about 20,000 are alive — 55 in every hundred. Roughly 2,200 of them are children and 4,200 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1980 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
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Corneliuss
- Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877)American businessman and tycoon
- Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997)Greek-French philosopher
- Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638)Bishop and theologian
- Cornelius Ryan (1920–1974)Irish American journalist
- Cornelius Sim (1951–2021)Catholic bishop
- Cornelius A. Smith (born 1937)11th governor-general of The Bahamas
- Cornelius Johnson (1913–1946)American high jumper
- Cornelius van Poelenburgh (1594–1667)Dutch painter
People named Cornelius with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Cornelius is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Cornelius is most concentrated in Mississippi (4.5×), Alabama (3.4×), Louisiana (2.6×), Georgia (2.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1974
The most popular boys’ names the year Cornelius peaked:
Cornelius elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland boys | Cornelius | 2,598 | 39th |
| Norway boys | Cornelius | 435 | 202nd |
| England and Wales boys | Cornelius | 208 | 2,018th |
| France boys | Cornelius | 35 | 4,621st |
| Scotland boys | Cornelius | 24 | 221st |
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.
Cornelius by city
| City | Years | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin boys | 2017–2023 | 7 | 404th |
One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.
Cornelius 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| the Netherlands boys | Cornelius | 4,581 | 20,033 |
| the Netherlands girls | Cornelius | — | 214 |
| Finland boys | Cornelius | 7 | 39 |
Among boys in the Netherlands this is mostly a middle name: of the 20,033 who carry it, 4,581 go by it.
A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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
Cornelius 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.