Errol
The boy's name Errol has been in the national records since 1896, with 8,631 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 5,399th. About 5,900 Errols are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 54.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Errol
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 8,631
- Estimated living today
- 5,900
- Median age today
- 54
- Peak year
- 1941
- Best rank
- 354th
- Rank in 2025
- 5,399th
- First recorded
- 1896
How old the living Errols are
born that year still alive today
Of the 8,631 babies given the name since 1896, about 5,900 are alive — 69 in every hundred. Roughly 430 of them are children and 1,800 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1971 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
Transferred from a rare Scottish surname derived from a place name, of unknown meaning. Later interpreted as a variant of Earl in the U.S.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Errols
- Errol Flynn (1909–1959)Australian actor
- Errol Morris (born 1948)American filmmaker and writer
- Errol Barrow (1920–1987)Barbadian politician
- Errol Spence (born 1990)American boxer
- Errol Musk (born 1946)South African businessman (born 1946) of Dutch-British descent
- Errol Brown (1943–2015)British singer and songwriter
- Errol Charles (born 1941)Saint Lucian politician
- Errol Kerr (born 1986)Jamaican freestyle skier
People named Errol with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Errol is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Errol is most concentrated in Louisiana (10.4×), New York (3.0×), Florida (2.4×), Illinois (1.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1941
The most popular boys’ names the year Errol peaked:
Errol elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Errol | 187 | 1,455th |
| France boys | Errol | 110 | 4,768th |
| Ireland boys | Errol | 28 | 246th |
| Scotland boys | Errol | 3 | 305th |
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.
Errol 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 | Errol | — | 11 |
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
Errol 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.