Sylvester
The boy's name Sylvester has been in the national records since 1880, with 43,857 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 2,207th. About 18,000 Sylvesters are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 62.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Sylvester boys named Sylvester
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 43,857
- Estimated living today
- 18,000
- Median age today
- 62
- Peak year
- 1920
- Best rank
- 174th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,207th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 627 / 43,230
How old the living Sylvesters are
born that year still alive today
Of the 43,857 babies given the name since 1880, about 18,000 are alive — 40 in every hundred. Roughly 1,200 of them are children and 7,800 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1963 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
Borrowed from Latin sylvester (“woody, rural”) from silva (“wood”); name of a saint whose feast day falls on December 31.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Sylvesters
- Sylvester Stallone (born 1946)American actor and filmmaker
- Sylvester I (300–336)33rd pope and saint (reigned 314-335)
- Sylvester II (died 1003)Pope of the Catholic Church from 938 to 1003
- Sylvester III (1000–1060)pope
- Sylvester McCoy (born 1943)Scottish actor
- Sylvester IV (1050–1111)Italian presbyter and priest, antipope from 1105 to 1111
- Sylvester Graham (1794–1851)American Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer
- Sylvester Groth (born 1958)German actor and tenor
People named Sylvester with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Sylvester is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Sylvester is most concentrated in Mississippi (6.4×), Alabama (3.2×), Arkansas (3.2×), South Carolina (2.6×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1920
The most popular boys’ names the year Sylvester peaked:
Sylvester elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Sylvester | 237 | 1,290th |
| Ireland boys | Sylvester | 117 | 148th |
| France boys | Sylvester | 80 | 1,504th |
| Poland boys | Sylvester | 12 birth registrations | 497th |
| Belgium boys | Sylvester | 5 | 1,367th |
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.
Sylvester 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 | Sylvester | 52 | 576 |
| Finland girls | Sylvester | — | 8 |
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
Sylvester 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.