Harlan
Harlan reached its high-water mark in 1924 at number 253, and has been recorded 26,980 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 617th. About 14,000 Harlans are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 36.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Harlan boys named Harlan
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 26,980
- Estimated living today
- 14,000
- Median age today
- 36
- Peak year
- 1924
- Best rank
- 253rd
- Rank in 2025
- 617th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 499 / 26,481
How old the living Harlans are
born that year still alive today
Of the 26,980 babies given the name since 1880, about 14,000 are alive — 51 in every hundred. Roughly 5,600 of them are children and 4,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1989 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, a place name
American contraction of Harland, from Old English har (“grey”) / hara (“hare”) + land (“land”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Harlans
- Harlan Ellison (1934–2018)American writer
- Harlan Coben (born 1962)American writer
- Harlan F. Stone (1872–1946)chief justice of the United States from 1941 to 1946
- Harlan Mathews (1927–2014)American politician
- Harlan Marbley (1943–2008)boxer
- John Harlan Kim (born 1993)Australian actor
People named Harlan with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Harlan is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Harlan is most concentrated in South Dakota (8.3×), Iowa (6.1×), North Dakota (5.8×), Nebraska (5.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1924
The most popular boys’ names the year Harlan peaked:
Harlan elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Harlan | 915 | 474th |
| France boys | Harlan | 65 | 5,398th |
| Scotland boys | Harlan | 11 | 599th |
| Ireland boys | Harlan | 10 | 615th |
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
Harlan 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.