Ned
Ned reached its high-water mark in 1939 at number 312, and has been recorded 17,297 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 8,910th. About 6,500 Neds are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Ned boys named Ned
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 17,297
- Estimated living today
- 6,500
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1939
- Best rank
- 312th
- Rank in 2025
- 8,910th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 5 / 17,292
How old the living Neds are
born that year still alive today
Of the 17,297 babies given the name since 1880, about 6,500 are alive — 37 in every hundred. Roughly 210 of them are children and 3,600 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1958 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 Neds
- Ned Beatty (1937–2021)American actor
- Ned Kelly (1854–1880)Australian bushranger
- Ned Zelic (born 1971)Australian association football player
- Ned Luke (born 1958)American actor
- Ned Maddrell (1877–1974)Manx fisherman
- Ned Lamont (born 1954)Governor of Connecticut since 2019
- Ned Rorem (1923–2022)American composer and diarist
- Ned Block (born 1942)American philosopher and academic
People named Ned with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Ned is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Ned is most concentrated in Utah (3.9×), South Carolina (2.8×), North Carolina (2.8×), Ohio (2.6×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1939
The most popular boys’ names the year Ned peaked:
Ned elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Ned | 1,661 | 389th |
| Ireland boys | Ned | 288 | 200th |
| France boys | Ned | 30 | 5,733rd |
| Northern Ireland boys | Ned | 13 | 352nd |
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
Ned 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.