Humanverse

Orpha

About 5,974 American babies have been named Orpha since 1880, most of them around 1917. It has not appeared in the national data since 2024. About 660 Orphas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 76.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 60 120 180 240 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Orpha

By the numbers

Total US births
5,974
Estimated living today
660
Median age today
76
Peak year
1917
Best rank
451st
Rank in 2025
unranked
First recorded
1880

How old the living Orphas are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 60 120 180 240 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 5,974 babies given the name since 1880, about 660 are alive — 11 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1949 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 Orpha is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Orpha is most concentrated in West Virginia (15.2×), Kentucky (4.6×), North Dakota (4.5×), Oklahoma (4.4×).

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

Names of 1917

The most popular girls’ names the year Orpha peaked:

All the names of 1917

Orpha elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
France girls Orpha 85 5,185th

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.

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.