Hector

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Hector boys named Hector

By the numbers

Total US births

109,209

Estimated living today

97,000

Median age today

31

Peak year

2005

Best rank

167th

Rank in 2025

409th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

481 / 108,728

How old the living Hectors are

born that year still alive today

Of the 109,209 babies given the name since 1880, about 97,000 are alive — 88 in every hundred. Roughly 21,000 of them are children and 7,100 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1994 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 Ancient Greek

From Latin Hectōr or Ancient Greek Ἕκτωρ, from ἕκτωρ (“holding fast”), from ἔχω (“to have, hold”), from Proto-Indo-European *seǵʰ- (“to hold; to overpower”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Hectors

• Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)French composer and conductor
• Héctor Bellerín (born 1995)Spanish association football player
• Hector Malot (1830–1907)French writer
• Héctor Moreno (born 1988)Mexican association football player
• Héctor Castro (1904–1960)Uruguayan footballer
• Héctor Scarone (1898–1967)Uruguayan footballer
• Héctor Herrera (born 1990)Mexican association football player
• Héctor Cúper (born 1955)Argentine footballer

People named Hector with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Hector is most common

• CA30,977
• TX27,950
• NY11,625
• IL5,055
• AZ4,488
• FL3,550
• NJ3,126
• MA1,708
• PA1,640
• CT1,282

Relative to how many babies each state records, Hector is most concentrated in Texas (3.4×), Arizona (3.4×), California (2.9×), New Mexico (2.1×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 2005

The most popular boys’ names the year Hector peaked:

• Jacob
• Michael
• Joshua
• Matthew
• Ethan
• Andrew

All the names of 2005

Hector elsewhere

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.

Hector: births by region

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.

By canton, Hector is most concentrated in Geneva, where 0.06% of children were given it – 59 of them.

Hector: rank by region

In 2025, Hector was given 5 times or more in 2 regions of Belgium.

In 2024, Hector was given 2 times or more in 1 region of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Hector appears in the lists for Province of Namur (59th), Province of East Flanders (86th), Province of Flemish Brabant (86th), Province of Hainaut (117th) and Province of Antwerp (181st).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Hector by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Hector 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.

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.

Where Hector lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 52,829 men called Hector were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.