Earl
About 291,421 American babies have been named Earl since 1880, most of them around 1921. In 2025 it ranked 2,230th. About 88,000 Earls are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Earl boys named Earl
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 291,421
- Estimated living today
- 88,000
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 31st
- Rank in 2025
- 2,230th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 2,247 / 289,174
How old the living Earls are
born that year still alive today
Of the 291,421 babies given the name since 1880, about 88,000 are alive — 30 in every hundred. Roughly 1,800 of them are children and 48,000 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 English
From earl (“nobleman”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Earls
- James Earl Jones (1931–2024)American actor
- Earl Wilbur Sutherland, Jr. (1915–1974)American pharmacologist
- Earl Warren (1891–1974)Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1953 to 1969
- James Earl Ray (1928–1998)American criminal, convicted for the murder of civil rights activist and Nobel peace prize laureate Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
- Earl Hines (1903–1983)American jazz pianist
- Earl Holliman (1928–2024)American actor
- Earl Boykins (born 1976)American basketball player
- Earl Scruggs (1924–2012)American musician
People named Earl with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Earl is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Earl is most concentrated in West Virginia (2.3×), Kentucky (2.2×), Louisiana (1.9×), Arkansas (1.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular boys’ names the year Earl peaked:
Earl elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Earl | 181 | 1,666th |
| France boys | Earl | 40 | 3,895th |
| Ireland boys | Earl | 22 | 254th |
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.
Earl 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 | Earl | 5 | 14 |
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
Earl 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.