Samuel

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Samuel boys named Samuel

By the numbers

Total US births

823,085

Estimated living today

627,000

Median age today

27

Peak year

2001

Best rank

26th

Rank in 2025

18th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

2,889 / 820,196

How old the living Samuels are

born that year still alive today

Of the 823,085 babies given the name since 1880, about 627,000 are alive — 76 in every hundred. Roughly 182,000 of them are children and 65,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1998 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 Hebrew

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

Notable Samuels

• Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)Irish writer
• Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)English writer and lexicographer
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)English poet, literary critic and philosopher
• Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791–1872)American inventor and painter
• Samuel L. Jackson (born 1948)American actor
• Samuel Eto'o (born 1981)Cameroonian association football player
• Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008)American political scientist
• Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635)16/17th-century French explorer of North America

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

Where Samuel is most common

• CA69,942
• TX61,305
• NY52,976
• PA47,996
• OH31,852
• FL31,665
• NC30,271
• IL30,078
• GA26,993
• VA24,752

Relative to how many babies each state records, Samuel is most concentrated in Alaska (1.7×), South Carolina (1.5×), Delaware (1.4×), Utah (1.4×).

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

Names of 2001

The most popular boys’ names the year Samuel peaked:

• Jacob
• Michael
• Matthew
• Joshua
• Christopher
• Nicholas

All the names of 2001

Samuel 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.

Samuel: 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, Samuel is most concentrated in Valais, where 0.54% of children were given it – 363 of them.

Samuel: rank by region

In 2025, Samuel was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2009, Samuel was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Spain.

In 2024, Samuel was among the 10 most common names in 2 regions of Italy. It has come first somewhere in 2 different years.

In 2025, Samuel was given 2 times or more in 14 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Samuel appears in the lists for Province of Walloon Brabant (24th), Province of Liège (34th), Brussels-Capital Region (40th), Province of Namur (50th), Province of Hainaut (82nd), Province of Flemish Brabant (102nd), Province of Antwerp (120th), Province of West Flanders (121st) and Province of East Flanders (179th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Spain after 10 names, 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.

Samuel by city

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

Samuel 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.

A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026, the Netherlands on 1 January 2018 – 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 Samuel lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 61,517 men called Samuel 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 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Samantha
• Sam
• Sammy
• Sammie
• Samara
• Samson
• Samir
• Samira
• Sami
• Samual
• Samiyah
• Samaria

Samuel against another name

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

• Samuel vs Samantha
• Samuel vs Sam
• Samuel vs Sammy
• Samuel vs Sammie
• Samuel vs Samara
• Samuel vs Samson

Compare Samuel with a name of your own