Louise

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Louise boys named Louise

By the numbers

Total US births

338,662

Estimated living today

79,000

Median age today

74

Peak year

1921

Best rank

22nd

Rank in 2025

514th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

336,466 / 2,196

How old the living Louises are

born that year still alive today

Of the 338,662 babies given the name since 1880, about 79,000 are alive — 23 in every hundred. Roughly 5,700 of them are children and 58,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1951 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 French

From French Louise, the feminine form of Louis.

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

Notable Louises

• Louise Glück (1943–2023)U.S. poet and Nobel laureate
• Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842)French portrait painter
• Louise Fletcher (1934–2022)American actress
• Louise Michel (1830–1905)French author and anarchist
• Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)French-American artist
• Louise Labé (1524–1566)French poet of the Renaissance, born in Lyon
• Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1776–1810)Queen consort of Prussia
• Louise Brooks (1906–1985)American actress

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

Where Louise is most common

• NY26,572
• PA21,172
• GA15,390
• IL12,307
• NC12,113
• MA12,021
• AL11,625
• SC11,151
• CA10,669
• VA10,236

Relative to how many babies each state records, Louise is most concentrated in South Carolina (2.7×), Mississippi (2.2×), Alabama (2.2×), Maine (2.0×).

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

Names of 1921

The most popular girls’ names the year Louise peaked:

• Mary
• Dorothy
• Helen
• Margaret
• Ruth
• Virginia

All the names of 1921

Louise 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.

Louise: 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, Louise is most concentrated in Geneva, where 0.30% of children were given it – 305 of them.

Louise: rank by region

In 2025, Louise was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium. It has come first somewhere in 2 different years.

In 2023, Louise was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2022, Louise was given 2 times or more in 1 region of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Louise appears in the lists for Province of Liège (2nd), Province of Namur (2nd), Province of Limburg (3rd), Province of East Flanders (3rd), Province of Walloon Brabant (3rd), Province of Flemish Brabant (5th), Province of Antwerp (6th), Province of Hainaut (7th), Province of West Flanders (12th), Province of Luxembourg (18th) and Brussels-Capital Region (23rd).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, 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.

Louise by city

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

Louise 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.

Among girls in Finland this is mostly a middle name: of the 2,467 who carry it, 269 go by it.

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 Louise lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 425 women called Louise 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 16 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 36 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

• Louis
• Lou
• Louie
• Louisa
• Lourdes
• Louella
• Louann
• Louvenia
• Louanne
• Louetta
• Louanna
• Loukas

Louise against another name

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

• Louise vs Louis
• Louise vs Lou
• Louise vs Louie
• Louise vs Louisa
• Louise vs Lourdes
• Louise vs Louella

Compare Louise with a name of your own