Denis

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Denis boys named Denis

By the numbers

Total US births

21,606

Estimated living today

15,000

Median age today

57

Peak year

1952

Best rank

277th

Rank in 2025

1,708th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

873 / 20,733

How old the living Denises are

born that year still alive today

Of the 21,606 babies given the name since 1880, about 15,000 are alive — 68 in every hundred. Roughly 2,100 of them are children and 5,700 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1968 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 Ancient Greek

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Deniss

• Denis Diderot (1713–1784)French Enlightenment philosopher writer and encyclopædist
• Denis Mukwege (born 1955)Congolese gynecologist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
• Denis Sassou-Nguesso (born 1943)President of the Republic of the Congo (1979–1992; 1997–present)
• Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840)French mathematician, mechanician and physicist
• Denis Villeneuve (born 1967)Canadian film director and screenwriter
• Denis Cheryshev (born 1990)Russian footballer
• Denis Fonvizin (1745–1792)Russian writer
• Denis Papin (1647–1713)French physicist, mathematician and inventor

People named Denis with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Denis is most common

• NY3,667
• CA1,783
• MA1,402
• IL1,095
• PA951
• NJ743
• OH699
• MI636
• TX563
• WI517

Relative to how many babies each state records, Denis is most concentrated in New Hampshire (6.3×), Rhode Island (3.8×), Massachusetts (3.5×), Maine (3.2×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1952

The most popular boys’ names the year Denis peaked:

• James
• Robert
• John
• Michael
• David
• William

All the names of 1952

Denis elsewhere

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.

Denis: births by region

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.

By canton, Denis is most concentrated in Ticino, where 0.12% of children were given it – 75 of them.

Denis: rank by region

In 2025, Denis was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2017, Denis was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Denis was given 2 times or more in 8 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Denis appears in the lists for Brussels-Capital Region (225th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 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.

Denis by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Denis 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.

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.

Where Denis lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 5,394 men called Denis and 212 women called Denis were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 50 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 2 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Women: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 15 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 37 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Dennis
• Denise
• Dena
• Denver
• Denny
• Denzel
• Denice
• Denisse
• Denton
• Dennie
• Denisha
• Denim

Denis against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Denis vs Dennis
• Denis vs Denise
• Denis vs Dena
• Denis vs Denver
• Denis vs Denny
• Denis vs Denzel

Compare Denis with a name of your own