Iain
About 2,911 American babies have been named Iain since 1953, most of them around 2003. In 2025 it ranked 7,194th. About 2,800 Iains are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 23.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Iain
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,911
- Estimated living today
- 2,800
- Median age today
- 23
- Peak year
- 2003
- Best rank
- 1,181st
- Rank in 2025
- 7,194th
- First recorded
- 1953
How old the living Iains are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,911 babies given the name since 1953, about 2,800 are alive — 97 in every hundred. Roughly 840 of them are children and 17 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2002 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 Scottish Gaelic
From Scottish Gaelic. Cognate of John; see there for more.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Iains
- Iain Banks (1954–2013)Scottish writer
- Iain Glen (born 1961)Scottish actor
- Iain Armitage (born 2008)American actor
- Iain Duncan Smith (born 1954)British politician
- Iain De Caestecker (born 1987)Scottish actor
- Iain Turner (born 1984)Scottish footballer
- Iain Pears (born 1955)British writer and art historian
- Iain Percy (born 1976)British sailor
People named Iain with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Iain is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Iain is most concentrated in California (3.6×), Washington (2.7×), Virginia (2.5×), Texas (2.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2003
The most popular boys’ names the year Iain peaked:
Iain elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland boys | Iain | 7,199 | 29th |
| England and Wales boys | Iain | 517 | 319th |
| Ireland boys | Iain | 274 | 191st |
| Northern Ireland boys | Iain | 18 | 221st |
| France boys | Iain | 5 | 3,445th |
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.
Iain 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 boys | Iain | 8 | 12 |
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.
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.