Dalton
About 86,142 American babies have been named Dalton since 1881, most of them around 1998. In 2025 it ranked 448th. About 79,000 Daltons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 25.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Dalton boys named Dalton
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 86,142
- Estimated living today
- 79,000
- Median age today
- 25
- Peak year
- 1998
- Best rank
- 88th
- Rank in 2025
- 448th
- First recorded
- 1881
- Girls / boys
- 432 / 85,710
How old the living Daltons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 86,142 babies given the name since 1881, about 79,000 are alive — 92 in every hundred. Roughly 17,000 of them are children and 1,500 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2000 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
From Old English dæl (“valley”) + tun (“settlement”). Equivalent.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Daltons
- Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911)British botanist, lichenologist, and surgeon
- Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)American screenwriter
- Dalton Tagelagi (born 1968)New Zealand politician, Premier of Niue
- Dalton Vigh (born 1964)Brazilian actor
- Dalton Knecht (born 2001)American basketball player
- Dalton McGuinty (born 1955)Canadian politician
- Dalton Jérson Trevisan (1925–2024)Brazilian writer
- Dalton Grant (born 1966)British athlete
People named Dalton with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Dalton is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Dalton is most concentrated in Oklahoma (2.3×), Alaska (2.3×), Kentucky (2.2×), Wyoming (2.2×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1998
The most popular boys’ names the year Dalton peaked:
Dalton elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Dalton | 1,579 | 469th |
| Scotland boys | Dalton | 54 | 482nd |
| Ireland boys | Dalton | 29 | 472nd |
| Northern Ireland boys | Dalton | 27 | 279th |
| France boys | Dalton | 5 | 5,300th |
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.
Dalton 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 | Dalton | 6 | 12 |
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
Dalton 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.