Merlene
About 2,379 American babies have been named Merlene since 1913, most of them around 1940. It has not appeared in the national data since 1984. About 1,100 Merlenes are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 75.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Merlene
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,379
- Estimated living today
- 1,100
- Median age today
- 75
- Peak year
- 1940
- Best rank
- 721st
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1913
How old the living Merlenes are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,379 babies given the name since 1913, about 1,100 are alive — 47 in every hundred. Roughly 0 of them are children and 920 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1950 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 Merlenes
- Merlene Ottey (born 1960)Jamaican-born Slovenian track athlete
- Merlene Frazer (born 1973)athletics competitor
People named Merlene with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Merlene is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Merlene is most concentrated in Utah (7.7×), Texas (5.3×), Oklahoma (4.4×), Louisiana (4.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1940
The most popular girls’ names the year Merlene peaked:
Merlene elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Merlene | 20 | 3,858th |
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
Merlene 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.