Ronald
About 1,086,091 American babies have been named Ronald since 1883, most of them around 1947. In 2025 it ranked 637th. About 654,000 Ronalds are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 66.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Ronald boys named Ronald
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 1,086,091
- Estimated living today
- 654,000
- Median age today
- 66
- Peak year
- 1947
- Best rank
- 11th
- Rank in 2025
- 637th
- First recorded
- 1883
- Girls / boys
- 3,844 / 1,082,247
How old the living Ronalds are
born that year still alive today
Of the 1,086,091 babies given the name since 1883, about 654,000 are alive — 60 in every hundred. Roughly 12,000 of them are children and 353,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1959 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 Germanic languages
Anglicized from Scottish Gaelic Raghnall, itself derived from Old Norse Rǫgnvaldr, from rǫgn (“advice”) + valdr (“power”), later partly merged with the Continental Germanic equivalent Reynold.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Ronalds
- Ronald Reagan (1911–2004)president of the United States from 1981 to 1989 and actor
- Ronald Ross (1857–1932)British doctor, Nobel laureate, writer, and artist
- Ronald Koeman (born 1963)Dutch football coach and former football player
- Ronald Fisher (1890–1962)British statistician, evolutionary biologist and geneticist
- Ronald Coase (1910–2013)British economist and Nobel laureate
- Ronald Golias (1929–2005)Brazilian actor and comedian
- Ronald George Wreyford Norrish (1897–1978)British chemist
- Ronald Colman (1891–1958)British actor
People named Ronald with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Ronald is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Ronald is most concentrated in the District of Columbia (1.6×), Michigan (1.5×), Iowa (1.5×), West Virginia (1.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1947
The most popular boys’ names the year Ronald peaked:
Ronald elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Ronald | 3,540 | 290th |
| New Zealand boys | Ronald | 1,769 | 36th |
| Scotland boys | Ronald | 1,177 | 63rd |
| England and Wales boys | Ronald | 1,112 | 569th |
| Norway boys | Ronald | 963 | 158th |
| Ireland boys | Ronald | 529 | 96th |
| Belgium boys | Ronald | 42 | 694th |
| Poland boys | Ronald | 15 birth registrations | 331st |
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.
Ronald: rank by region
In 1995, Ronald was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Ronald | 487 | 8 |
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Ronald 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| the Netherlands boys | Ronald | 44,588 | 53,029 |
| Finland boys | Ronald | 85 | 229 |
| the Netherlands girls | Ronald | — | 191 |
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 Ronald lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 1,324 men called Ronald 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
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alicante/Alacant | Ronald | 140 | 0.139 | 607 |
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Ronald | 60 | 0.113 | 811 |
| Málaga | Ronald | 95 | 0.109 | 588 |
| Balears, Illes | Ronald | 61 | 0.098 | 724 |
| Palmas, Las | Ronald | 56 | 0.096 | 942 |
| Madrid | Ronald | 243 | 0.071 | 804 |
Listed in 34 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 18 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
Ronald 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.