Gail
The girl's name Gail has been in the national records since 1881, with 210,698 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 8,362nd. About 146,000 Gails are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 71.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Gail boys named Gail
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 210,698
- Estimated living today
- 146,000
- Median age today
- 71
- Peak year
- 1951
- Best rank
- 36th
- Rank in 2025
- 8,362nd
- First recorded
- 1881
- Girls / boys
- 201,746 / 8,952
How old the living Gails are
born that year still alive today
Of the 210,698 babies given the name since 1881, about 146,000 are alive — 70 in every hundred. Roughly 310 of them are children and 112,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1954 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 Gails
- Gail Devers (born 1966)American athletics competitor, sprinter, hurdler
- Gail Kim (born 1977)Canadian professional wrestler, model and actress
- Gail O'Grady (born 1963)American actress
- Gail Russell (1924–1961)actress
- Gail Patrick (1911–1980)American actress and television producer
- Gail Fisher (1935–2000)American actress
- Gail Goodrich (born 1943)American basketball player
- Gail Ann Dorsey (born 1962)American singer and bassist
People named Gail with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Gail is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Gail is most concentrated in Rhode Island (2.8×), Massachusetts (2.3×), Hawaii (2.2×), Maine (2.2×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1951
The most popular girls’ names the year Gail peaked:
Gail elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland girls | Gail | 1,554 | 53rd |
| New Zealand girls | Gail | 1,253 | 34th |
| Ireland girls | Gail | 369 | 178th |
| France girls | Gail | 60 | 6,674th |
| England and Wales girls | Gail | 39 | 1,958th |
| France boys | Gail | 10 | 3,777th |
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.
Gail 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 girls | Gail | — | 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
Gail 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.