Donna
The girl's name Donna has been in the national records since 1880, with 833,874 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 1,962nd. About 594,000 Donnas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Donna boys named Donna
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 833,874
- Estimated living today
- 594,000
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1959
- Best rank
- 5th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,962nd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 831,641 / 2,233
How old the living Donnas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 833,874 babies given the name since 1880, about 594,000 are alive — 71 in every hundred. Roughly 2,800 of them are children and 367,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1958 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 Italian
A 19th-century invention from the Italian noun donna; also interpreted as a feminine form of Donald.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Donnas
- Donna Strickland (born 1959)Canadian physicist, Nobel laurate
- Donna Summer (1948–2012)American singer
- Donna Tartt (born 1963)American writer
- Donna Reed (1921–1986)American film and television actress
- Donna Haraway (born 1944)American philosopher, scholar in the field of science and technology studies
- Donna Vekić (born 1996)Croatian tennis player
- Donna Karan (born 1948)American fashion designer
- Donna Leon (born 1942)American crime novelist
People named Donna with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Donna is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Donna is most concentrated in Rhode Island (2.0×), South Dakota (1.7×), Massachusetts (1.5×), West Virginia (1.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1959
The most popular girls’ names the year Donna peaked:
Donna elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand girls | Donna | 7,054 | 8th |
| Scotland girls | Donna | 5,952 | 14th |
| Ireland girls | Donna | 3,502 | 33rd |
| France girls | Donna | 710 | 890th |
| England and Wales girls | Donna | 445 | 441st |
| Belgium girls | Donna | 154 | 520th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Donna | 16 | 259th |
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.
Donna: rank by region
In 2025, Donna was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Donna | 329 | 16 |
In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Donna appears in the lists for Province of East Flanders (250th) and Province of Antwerp (326th).
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.
Donna 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 girls | Donna | 2,181 | 2,514 |
| Finland girls | Donna | 74 | 108 |
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
Donna 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.