Melville
Melville reached its high-water mark in 1918 at number 728, and has been recorded 2,283 times in all. It has not appeared in the national data since 1981. About 400 Melvilles are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 73.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Melville boys named Melville
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,283
- Estimated living today
- 400
- Median age today
- 73
- Peak year
- 1918
- Best rank
- 728th
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 14 / 2,269
How old the living Melvilles are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,283 babies given the name since 1880, about 400 are alive — 18 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1952 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 Melvilles
- Melville Fuller (1833–1910)chief justice of the United States from 1888 to 1910
- Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905)British linguist
- Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963)American anthropologist
- Melville Shavelson (1917–2007)American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author
- Melville Cooper (1896–1973)British actor
People named Melville with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Melville is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Melville is most concentrated in New York (7.1×), Illinois (2.6×), California (1.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1918
The most popular boys’ names the year Melville peaked:
Melville elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Melville | 70 | 2,557th |
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
Melville 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.