Ilse

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Ilse

By the numbers

Total US births

2,401

Estimated living today

2,200

Median age today

26

Peak year

1993

Best rank

1,518th

Rank in 2025

3,903rd

First recorded

1914

How old the living Ilses are

born that year still alive today

Of the 2,401 babies given the name since 1914, about 2,200 are alive — 90 in every hundred. Roughly 660 of them are children and 100 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1999 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.

Notable Ilses

• Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016)Austrian writer
• Ilse Koch (1906–1967)German war criminal, wife of camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch
• Ilse DeLange (born 1977)Dutch country and pop singer
• Ilse Werner (1921–2005)German actress
• Ilse Steppat (1917–1969)German actress
• Ilse Paulis (born 1993)Dutch rower
• Ilse Bing (1899–1998)German photographer
• Ilse Heylen (born 1977)Belgian judoka

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

Where Ilse is most common

• TX529
• CA523
• AZ67
• IL46
• NY36
• NJ5
• WI5

Relative to how many babies each state records, Ilse is most concentrated in Texas (5.7×), Arizona (4.5×), California (4.3×), Illinois (0.8×).

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

Names of 1993

The most popular girls’ names the year Ilse peaked:

• Jessica
• Ashley
• Sarah
• Samantha
• Emily
• Brittany

All the names of 1993

Ilse 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.

Ilse: rank by region

In 2010, Ilse was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.

Ilse 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 – 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 Ilse lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 197 women called Ilse 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

Listed in 10 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 42 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

• Ilsa

Ilse against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Ilse vs Ilsa

Compare Ilse with a name of your own