Dempsey
About 4,799 American babies have been named Dempsey since 1880, most of them around 1921. In 2025 it ranked 2,991st. About 2,800 Dempseys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 15.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Dempsey boys named Dempsey
Girls and boys called Dempsey
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Both, throughout, without either side ever taking it over: 550 girls and 4,249 boys in all, and in 2025 the split was 44 to 41.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 71 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
- 4,799
- Estimated living today
- 2,800
- Median age today
- 15
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 609th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,991st
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 550 / 4,249
How old the living Dempseys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 4,799 babies given the name since 1880, about 2,800 are alive — 59 in every hundred. Roughly 1,500 of them are children and 520 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2010 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.
Notable Dempseys
- Dempsey Wilson (1927–1971)racing driver
People named Dempsey with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Dempsey is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Dempsey is most concentrated in West Virginia (10.1×), North Carolina (6.2×), Alabama (4.8×), Oklahoma (3.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular boys’ names the year Dempsey peaked:
Dempsey elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Dempsey | 207 | 1,620th |
| England and Wales girls | Dempsey | 96 | 1,958th |
| France boys | Dempsey | 45 | 4,671st |
| Belgium boys | Dempsey | 18 | 908th |
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.
Dempsey: rank by region
In 1998, Dempsey was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Dempsey | 633 | 6 |
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.
Related names
Dempsey 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.