Hilda
The girl's name Hilda has been in the national records since 1880, with 81,200 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 2,998th. About 22,000 Hildas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Hilda boys named Hilda
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 81,200
- Estimated living today
- 22,000
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 123rd
- Rank in 2025
- 2,998th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 81,022 / 178
How old the living Hildas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 81,200 babies given the name since 1880, about 22,000 are alive — 28 in every hundred. Roughly 900 of them are children and 12,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1958 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 Germanic languages
Short form of Germanic names beginning or ending in hild (“battle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Hildas
- Hilda Heine (born 1951)Marshallese politician
- Hilda Solis (born 1957)25th United States Secretary of Labor
- Hilda Geiringer (1893–1973)Austrian mathematician
- Princess Hilda of Nassau (1864–1952)Grand Duchess of Baden
- Hilda Gadea (1925–1974)Peruvian economist, Communist leader, and author, 1925-1974
- Hilda (614–680)Christian saint and the founding abbess of the monastery at Whitby, England
- Hilda Crozzoli (1900–1972)first female architect and civil engineer in Austria
- Hilda Gobbi (1913–1988)Hungarian actress of Italian origin
People named Hilda with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Hilda is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Hilda is most concentrated in Louisiana (2.7×), North Carolina (2.6×), North Dakota (2.5×), West Virginia (2.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular girls’ names the year Hilda peaked:
Hilda elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden girls | Hilda | 3,553 | 68th |
| France girls | Hilda | 1,355 | 377th |
| Ireland girls | Hilda | 336 | 160th |
| Norway girls | Hilda | 326 | 203rd |
| England and Wales girls | Hilda | 156 | 1,809th |
| Switzerland girls | Hilda | 38 | 1,013th |
| Belgium girls | Hilda | 5 | 1,336th |
| Scotland girls | Hilda | 4 | 450th |
| Poland girls | Hilda | 2 birth registrations | 706th |
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.
Hilda: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Hilda | 30 | 0.002% | 881st |
| French girls | Switzerland | Hilda | 8 | 0.002% | 663rd |
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.
Hilda by city
| City | Years | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin girls | 2017–2023 | 90 | 163rd |
One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.
Hilda 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 | Hilda | 2,978 | 5,039 |
| Finland girls | Hilda | 2,785 | 4,489 |
| the Netherlands boys | Hilda | — | 56 |
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.
Where Hilda lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 1,494 women called Hilda were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Women: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lugo | Hilda | 45 | 0.268 | 391 |
| Asturias | Hilda | 119 | 0.224 | 459 |
| Ourense | Hilda | 24 | 0.151 | 530 |
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Hilda | 82 | 0.148 | 691 |
| Palmas, Las | Hilda | 80 | 0.136 | 756 |
| Pontevedra | Hilda | 64 | 0.130 | 582 |
Listed in 37 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 15 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.
Related names
Hilda 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.