Tonya
Tonya reached its high-water mark in 1972 at number 37, and has been recorded 120,856 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 8,860th. About 112,000 Tonyas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 52.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Tonya boys named Tonya
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 120,856
- Estimated living today
- 112,000
- Median age today
- 52
- Peak year
- 1972
- Best rank
- 37th
- Rank in 2025
- 8,860th
- First recorded
- 1923
- Girls / boys
- 120,421 / 435
How old the living Tonyas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 120,856 babies given the name since 1923, about 112,000 are alive — 92 in every hundred. Roughly 470 of them are children and 5,600 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1973 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 Russian
Phonetic rendering of an informal pet form of Антони́на (“Antonina”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Tonyas
- Tonya Harding (born 1970)American figure skater
- Tonya Verbeek (born 1977)Olympic wrestler
- Tonya Pinkins (born 1962)actress, singer, writer, activist, author
- Tonya Williams (born 1958)Canadian actress, producer, and activist
People named Tonya with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Tonya is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Tonya is most concentrated in North Carolina (2.1×), Kentucky (2.1×), South Carolina (2.0×), Tennessee (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1972
The most popular girls’ names the year Tonya peaked:
Tonya elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Tonya | 185 | 1,710th |
| Ireland girls | Tonya | 32 | 409th |
| England and Wales girls | Tonya | 28 | 1,914th |
| Belgium girls | Tonya | 16 | 1,169th |
| Scotland girls | Tonya | 3 | 508th |
| Poland girls | Tonya | 2 birth registrations | 721st |
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.
Tonya: rank by region
In 2004, Tonya was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Tonya | 785 | 5 |
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Tonya 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 | Tonya | 10 | 10 |
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
Tonya 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.