Peter

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Peter boys named Peter

By the numbers

Total US births

591,531

Estimated living today

390,000

Median age today

54

Peak year

1957

Best rank

37th

Rank in 2025

187th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

1,943 / 589,588

How old the living Peters are

born that year still alive today

Of the 591,531 babies given the name since 1880, about 390,000 are alive — 66 in every hundred. Roughly 34,000 of them are children and 116,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1971 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 Ancient Greek

From Middle English Peter, from Old English Petrus, from Latin Petrus, from Ancient Greek Πέτρος, from πέτρος (“stone, rock”).

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

Notable Peters

• Peter the Great (1672–1725)Tsar/Emperor of Russia from 1682 to 1725
• Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)Flemish painter
• Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921)Russian revolutionary socialist and philosopher
• Peter Abelard (1079–1142)French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician (c.1079-1142)
• Peter O'Toole (1932–2013)British-Irish actor
• Peter Jackson (born 1961)New Zealand film director, screenwriter, producer and actor
• Peter Higgs (1929–2024)British physicist and Nobel Prize winner
• Peter Handke (born 1942)Austrian writer, playwright and film director

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

Where Peter is most common

• NY117,314
• CA50,613
• MA44,742
• NJ37,499
• PA37,209
• IL34,067
• MI22,137
• CT21,148
• WI19,214
• OH17,666

Relative to how many babies each state records, Peter is most concentrated in Connecticut (3.3×), Rhode Island (3.1×), Massachusetts (3.1×), Vermont (2.8×).

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

Names of 1957

The most popular boys’ names the year Peter peaked:

• Michael
• James
• David
• Robert
• John
• William

All the names of 1957

Peter 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.

Peter: 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, Peter is most concentrated in Schwyz, where 0.07% of children were given it – 25 of them.

Peter: rank by region

In 2022, Peter was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

In 2020, Peter was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2023, Peter was given 2 times or more in 2 regions of Poland.

In 2018, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Peter appears in the lists for Brussels-Capital Region (281st).

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.

Peter by city

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

Peter 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.

Among girls in the Netherlands this is mostly a middle name: of the 1,698 who carry it, 7 go by it.

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 Peter lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 2,663 men called Peter 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 33 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 19 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Pete
• Petra
• Petrina
• Peterson
• Petros
• Petar

Peter against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Peter vs Pete
• Peter vs Petra
• Peter vs Petrina
• Peter vs Peterson
• Peter vs Petros
• Peter vs Petar

Compare Peter with a name of your own