Oscar

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Oscar boys named Oscar

By the numbers

Total US births

214,168

Estimated living today

141,000

Median age today

27

Peak year

2006

Best rank

118th

Rank in 2025

223rd

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

1,070 / 213,098

How old the living Oscars are

born that year still alive today

Of the 214,168 babies given the name since 1880, about 141,000 are alive — 66 in every hundred. Roughly 39,000 of them are children and 15,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1998 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 Irish, Old English

Exact origin. Resuscitated by James Mcpherson in The Works of Ossian (1765). Napoleon, an admirer of the Ossianic poems, chose it for his godson Oscar Bernadotte, who became a king of Sweden.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Oscars

• Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete
• Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012)Brazilian architect
• Óscar Arias Sánchez (born 1941)President of Costa Rica (1986–1990, 2006–2010)
• Oscar Pistorius (born 1986)South African sprinter and convicted murderer
• Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (1918–2012)9th President of Italy
• Oscar II of Sweden (1829–1907)King of Sweden from 1872 to 1907 and Norway from 1872 to 1905
• Oscar I of Sweden (1799–1859)King of Sweden and Norway between 1844–1859
• Oscar (born 1991)Brazilian association football player

People named Oscar with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Oscar is most common

• CA42,870
• TX37,586
• NY9,964
• IL8,876
• FL6,684
• GA6,475
• NC5,398
• AZ5,352
• AL4,221
• VA3,659

Relative to how many babies each state records, Oscar is most concentrated in Texas (2.5×), Arizona (2.2×), California (2.2×), Nevada (1.8×).

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

Names of 2006

The most popular boys’ names the year Oscar peaked:

• Jacob
• Michael
• Joshua
• Ethan
• Matthew
• Daniel

All the names of 2006

Oscar elsewhere

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.

Oscar: births by region

Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.

By canton, Oscar is most concentrated in Geneva, where 0.25% of children were given it – 251 of them.

Oscar: rank by region

In 2025, Oscar was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2017, Oscar was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Oscar was given 2 times or more in 8 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Oscar appears in the lists for Province of Luxembourg (9th), Province of Flemish Brabant (10th), Province of Namur (10th), Brussels-Capital Region (12th), Province of Antwerp (15th), Province of Walloon Brabant (21st), Province of Liège (23rd), Province of East Flanders (24th), Province of Hainaut (24th), Province of West Flanders (38th) and Province of Limburg (43rd).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Oscar by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Oscar 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.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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.

Where Oscar lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 123,663 men called Oscar were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.