Erna
About 9,071 American babies have been named Erna since 1880, most of them around 1916. It has not appeared in the national data since 2021. About 1,300 Ernas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 74.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Erna boys named Erna
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 9,071
- Estimated living today
- 1,300
- Median age today
- 74
- Peak year
- 1916
- Best rank
- 321st
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 9,060 / 11
How old the living Ernas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 9,071 babies given the name since 1880, about 1,300 are alive — 15 in every hundred. Roughly 50 of them are children and 950 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1951 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 Ernas
- Erna Solberg (born 1961)Prime Minister of Norway from 2013 to 2021
- Erna Schneider Hoover (born 1926)American mathematician
- Erna Morena (1885–1962)German actress
- Erna Berger (1900–1990)operatic singer
- Erna Bogen-Bogáti (1906–2002)Hungarian fencer
- Erna Siikavirta (born 1977)Finnish keyboardist
- Erna Flegel (1911–2006)German nurse
- Erna Hennicot-Schoepges (born 1941)Luxembourgish politician
People named Erna with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Erna is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Erna is most concentrated in North Dakota (17.6×), South Dakota (7.6×), Wisconsin (6.4×), Nebraska (4.2×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1916
The most popular girls’ names the year Erna peaked:
Erna elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Erna | 2,735 | 192nd |
| Norway girls | Erna | 1,110 | 74th |
| Switzerland girls | Erna | 58 | 879th |
| Poland girls | Erna | 4 birth registrations | 491st |
| England and Wales girls | Erna | 3 | 3,900th |
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.
Erna: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Erna | 49 | 0.004% | 676th |
| French girls | Switzerland | Erna | 9 | 0.002% | 509th |
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.
Erna by city
| City | Years | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin girls | 2017–2023 | 8 | 351st |
One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.
Erna 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 | Erna | 3,135 | 4,522 |
| Finland girls | Erna | 238 | 316 |
| the Netherlands boys | Erna | — | 62 |
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
Erna 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.