Rosemary
About 163,523 American babies have been named Rosemary since 1882, most of them around 1947. In 2025 it ranked 251st. About 90,000 Rosemarys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Rosemary boys named Rosemary
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 163,523
- Estimated living today
- 90,000
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1947
- Best rank
- 80th
- Rank in 2025
- 251st
- First recorded
- 1882
- Girls / boys
- 163,165 / 358
How old the living Rosemarys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 163,523 babies given the name since 1882, about 90,000 are alive — 55 in every hundred. Roughly 12,000 of them are children and 49,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1958 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 Latin
A combination of referring to the flower as a symbol of Virgin Mary, first recorded in the eighteenth century. It is found in continental Europe as Rosemarie and Rosa Maria. After mid-nineteenth century when flower names became common it may also refer to the herb rosemary, Latin ros marinus "dew of the sea".
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Rosemarys
- Rosemary Clooney (1928–2002)American singer and actress
- Rosemary Harris (born 1927)British actress
- Rosemary Kennedy (1918–2005)younger sister of John F. Kennedy
- Rosemary Casals (born 1948)US tennis player
- Rosemary Murphy (1925–2014)German-American actress
- Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936–2022)American theologian
- Rosemary Sutcliff (1920–1992)English novelist
- Rosemary DeCamp (1910–2001)American actress
People named Rosemary with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Rosemary is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Rosemary is most concentrated in Illinois (1.6×), New York (1.6×), Wisconsin (1.6×), Indiana (1.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1947
The most popular girls’ names the year Rosemary peaked:
Rosemary elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Rosemary | 2,301 | 260th |
| New Zealand girls | Rosemary | 1,918 | 29th |
| Ireland girls | Rosemary | 1,676 | 69th |
| Scotland girls | Rosemary | 732 | 132nd |
| France girls | Rosemary | 460 | 1,216th |
| Italy girls | Rosemary | 298 | — |
| Northern Ireland girls | Rosemary | 31 | 225th |
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.
Rosemary 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 girls | Rosemary | 25 | 56 |
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.
Where Rosemary lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 178 women called Rose Mary were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Women: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alicante/Alacant | Rosemary | 47 | 0.046 | 1,406 |
| Málaga | Rosemary | 39 | 0.043 | 1,310 |
| Almería | Rosemary | 15 | 0.040 | 1,486 |
| Balears, Illes | Rosemary | 20 | 0.032 | 1,778 |
| Navarra | Rosemary | 10 | 0.029 | 1,844 |
| Tarragona | Rosemary | 10 | 0.023 | 2,133 |
Listed in 28 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 24 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
Rosemary 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.