Ursula

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Ursula

By the numbers

Total US births

14,811

Estimated living today

9,500

Median age today

54

Peak year

1967

Best rank

474th

Rank in 2025

4,661st

First recorded

1881

How old the living Ursulas are

born that year still alive today

Of the 14,811 babies given the name since 1881, about 9,500 are alive — 64 in every hundred. Roughly 540 of them are children and 1,700 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1971 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

From Latin Ursula, the name of a fourth century saint. Via cognate with Arcady.

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

Notable Ursulas

• Ursula von der Leyen (born 1958)President of the European Commission since 2019
• Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018)American fantasy and science fiction author
• Ursula Andress (born 1936)Swiss actress
• Úrsula Corberó (born 1989)Spanish actress, singer and model
• Saint Ursula (400–385)Frankish saint
• Ursula Karven (born 1964)German actress and author
• Ursula Franklin (1921–2016)Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator
• Ursula Burns (born 1958)American businessperson

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

Where Ursula is most common

• NY1,676
• CA1,174
• TX842
• PA757
• IL670
• LA597
• OH529
• MI433
• NJ407
• MA336

Relative to how many babies each state records, Ursula is most concentrated in Louisiana (3.5×), New York (2.3×), New Jersey (1.6×), New Mexico (1.5×).

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

Names of 1967

The most popular girls’ names the year Ursula peaked:

• Lisa
• Kimberly
• Michelle
• Mary
• Susan
• Karen

All the names of 1967

Ursula 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.

Ursula: 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.

Ursula by city

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

Ursula 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.

Among girls in Finland this is mostly a middle name: of the 1,434 who carry it, 275 go by it.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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.

Where Ursula lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 4,915 women called Ursula were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Women: 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.