Rodney
Rodney reached its high-water mark in 1965 at number 33, and has been recorded 248,325 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,091st. About 185,000 Rodneys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 58.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Rodney boys named Rodney
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 248,325
- Estimated living today
- 185,000
- Median age today
- 58
- Peak year
- 1965
- Best rank
- 33rd
- Rank in 2025
- 1,091st
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 1,175 / 247,150
How old the living Rodneys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 248,325 babies given the name since 1880, about 185,000 are alive — 74 in every hundred. Roughly 6,000 of them are children and 55,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1967 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 a surname
From Old English placename Hrōdanīeġ, Hrōdanīġ, from Proto-Germanic *hrōþiz (“fame”) and *awjō (“island”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Rodneys
- Rodney Robert Porter (1917–1985)English biochemist and Nobel laureate
- Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004)American stand-up comedian
- Rodney King (1965–2012)African American police brutality victim
- Rodney Williams (born 1947)Governor-General of Antigua and Barbuda
- Rodney Strasser (born 1990)Sierra Leonean footballer
- Rodney Mullen (born 1966)American professional skateboarder
- Rodney Wallace (born 1988)Costa Rican footballer
- Rodney Alcala (1943–2021)American serial killer
People named Rodney with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Rodney is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Rodney is most concentrated in North Dakota (2.4×), Hawaii (2.4×), South Dakota (2.1×), Nebraska (2.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1965
The most popular boys’ names the year Rodney peaked:
Rodney elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand boys | Rodney | 1,936 | 42nd |
| France boys | Rodney | 475 | 581st |
| England and Wales boys | Rodney | 238 | 1,361st |
| Ireland boys | Rodney | 228 | 135th |
| Scotland boys | Rodney | 68 | 163rd |
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.
Rodney 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 | Rodney | 17 | 23 |
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.
Related names
Rodney 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.