Ellison
Ellison reached its high-water mark in 2021 at number 837, and has been recorded 8,658 times in all. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 1,065th. About 7,800 Ellisons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 10.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Ellison boys named Ellison
Girls and boys called Ellison
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Ellison crossed from boys to girls in 1995, and has stayed there for 31 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 88% girls, and in 2025 it was 70%.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 46 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
- 8,658
- Estimated living today
- 7,800
- Median age today
- 10
- Peak year
- 2021
- Best rank
- 837th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,065th
- First recorded
- 1881
- Girls / boys
- 5,695 / 2,963
How old the living Ellisons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 8,658 babies given the name since 1881, about 7,800 are alive — 90 in every hundred. Roughly 5,800 of them are children and 220 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2015 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
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Ellisons
- Ellison Onizuka (1946–1986)American astronaut from Kealakekua, Kona, Hawaii, first Asian American to reach space, later died in the Space Shuttle Challenger accident
- Ellison D. Smith (1864–1944)American politician
People named Ellison with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Ellison is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Ellison is most concentrated in South Carolina (7.3×), Tennessee (2.5×), North Carolina (2.5×), Georgia (2.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2021
The most popular girls’ names the year Ellison peaked:
Ellison elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Ellison | 391 | 863rd |
| England and Wales girls | Ellison | 52 | 1,372nd |
| Scotland girls | Ellison | 4 | 674th |
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.
Related names
Ellison 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.