Napoleon
The boy's name Napoleon has been in the national records since 1880, with 7,810 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 4,539th. About 3,600 Napoleons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 53.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Napoleon boys named Napoleon
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 7,810
- Estimated living today
- 3,600
- Median age today
- 53
- Peak year
- 1926
- Best rank
- 552nd
- Rank in 2025
- 4,539th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 5 / 7,805
How old the living Napoleons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 7,810 babies given the name since 1880, about 3,600 are alive — 47 in every hundred. Roughly 330 of them are children and 1,100 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1972 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 Italian
From French Napoléon, from Italian Napoleone, name of an early saint, of uncertain origin; possibly from the Germanic clan name Nibelung. By folk etymology explained as Napoli (“Naples”) + leone (“lion”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Napoleons
- Napoleon (1769–1821)French military leader, French Emperor 1804–1814 and again in 1815
- Napoleon III (1808–1873)President of the Second French Republic, Emperor of the Second French Empire and last monarch of France
- Napoleon II (1811–1832)The second Emperor of the French
- Napoleon Hill (1883–1970)American author
- Napoleon Louis Bonaparte (1804–1831)middle son of Louis I of Holland and Hortense de Beauharnais
- Napoléon, Prince Imperial (1856–1879)French prince
- Prince Napoléon-Jérôme, Prince Napoléon (1822–1891)Napoleon's nephew
- José Napoleón Duarte (1925–1990)President of El Salvador
People named Napoleon with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Napoleon is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Napoleon is most concentrated in Alabama (7.3×), Mississippi (7.3×), Arkansas (4.8×), Georgia (4.2×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1926
The most popular boys’ names the year Napoleon peaked:
Napoleon elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Napoleon +1 spelling | 485 | 291st |
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.
Napoleon 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 | Napoleon | 5 | 38 |
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.