Humanverse

Tierney

The girl's name Tierney has been in the national records since 1957, with 3,979 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 7,133rd. About 3,900 Tierneys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 28.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 50 100 150 200 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Tierney boys named Tierney

By the numbers

Total US births
3,979
Estimated living today
3,900
Median age today
28
Peak year
1993
Best rank
1,059th
Rank in 2025
7,133rd
First recorded
1957
Girls / boys
3,956 / 23

How old the living Tierneys are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 50 100 150 200 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 3,979 babies given the name since 1957, about 3,900 are alive — 98 in every hundred. Roughly 940 of them are children and 90 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1997 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

Anglicized from Gaelic Ó Tiarnaigh "descendant of Tiarnach", a diminutive of tiarna (“lord, master”).

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

Notable Tierneys

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

Where Tierney is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Tierney is most concentrated in Tennessee (5.4×), Pennsylvania (2.2×), Florida (2.0×), Texas (1.6×).

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

Names of 1993

The most popular girls’ names the year Tierney peaked:

All the names of 1993

Tierney elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
England and Wales girls Tierney 556 524th
Scotland girls Tierney 20 525th
Scotland boys Tierney 11 516th
England and Wales boys Tierney 7 3,822nd

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.

Related names

Tierney against another name

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

Compare Tierney 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.