Horace
Horace is a boy's name that peaked in 1921, when it was the 129th most popular in the United States. In 2025 it ranked 6,143rd. About 15,000 Horaces are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 68.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Horace boys named Horace
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 54,356
- Estimated living today
- 15,000
- Median age today
- 68
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 129th
- Rank in 2025
- 6,143rd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 202 / 54,154
How old the living Horaces are
born that year still alive today
Of the 54,356 babies given the name since 1880, about 15,000 are alive — 27 in every hundred. Roughly 420 of them are children and 8,500 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1957 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 Latin
From Latin Horatius, a Roman family name of obscure origin, possibly from ett.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Horaces
- Horace Walpole (1717–1797)English writer and politician
- Horace Greeley (1811–1872)American politician and publisher
- Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–1799)Genevan scientist
- Horace Mann (1796–1859)American politician
- Horace Vernet (1789–1863)French painter
- Horace Silver (1928–2014)American jazz pianist and composer
- Horace Parnell Tuttle (1837–1923)American astronomer
- Horace Grant (born 1965)American basketball player
People named Horace with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Horace is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Horace is most concentrated in Georgia (4.5×), Alabama (4.4×), South Carolina (4.1×), North Carolina (3.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular boys’ names the year Horace peaked:
Horace elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Horace | 720 | 317th |
| England and Wales boys | Horace | 51 | 2,941st |
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
Horace 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.