Humanverse

Sylva

About 908 American babies have been named Sylva since 1886, most of them around 1919. In 2025 it ranked 11,932nd. About 150 Sylvas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 76.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 8 16 24 32 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Sylva boys named Sylva

By the numbers

Total US births
908
Estimated living today
150
Median age today
76
Peak year
1919
Best rank
1,393rd
Rank in 2025
11,932nd
First recorded
1886
Girls / boys
890 / 18

How old the living Sylvas are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 10 20 30 40 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 908 babies given the name since 1886, about 150 are alive — 17 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1949 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.

Notable Sylvas

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

Where Sylva is most common

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

Names of 1919

The most popular girls’ names the year Sylva peaked:

All the names of 1919

Sylva elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
France girls Sylva 260 591st
England and Wales girls Sylva 6 5,666th
France boys Sylva 5 944th

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.

Sylva 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 Sylva 74 104

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

Sylva against another name

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

Compare Sylva with a name of your own

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.