Ross
About 82,293 American babies have been named Ross since 1880, most of them around 1985. In 2025 it ranked 1,459th. About 56,000 Rosses are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 43.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Ross boys named Ross
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 82,293
- Estimated living today
- 56,000
- Median age today
- 43
- Peak year
- 1985
- Best rank
- 147th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,459th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 421 / 81,872
How old the living Rosses are
born that year still alive today
Of the 82,293 babies given the name since 1880, about 56,000 are alive — 69 in every hundred. Roughly 3,100 of them are children and 11,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1982 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
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Rosss
- Ross Barkley (born 1993)English association football player
- Ross Perot (1930–2019)American businessman and politician
- Ross Lynch (born 1995)American actor and singer
- Ross Brawn (born 1954)British automotive engineer
- Ross Macdonald (1915–1983)American writer
- Ross Turnbull (born 1985)English footballer
- Ross Butler (born 1990)Singaporean-born American actor
- Ross Ulbricht (born 1984)American founder and administrator of the illicit online marketplace the Silk Road
People named Ross with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Ross is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Ross is most concentrated in Hawaii (2.5×), North Dakota (2.2×), Minnesota (2.1×), South Dakota (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1985
The most popular boys’ names the year Ross peaked:
Ross elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland boys | Ross | 18,926 | 9th |
| England and Wales boys | Ross | 7,755 | 60th |
| New Zealand boys | Ross | 4,823 | 27th |
| Ireland boys | Ross | 4,697 | 40th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Ross | 961 | 30th |
| France boys | Ross | 90 | 3,337th |
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.
Ross 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 | Ross | 21 | 53 |
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
Ross 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.