Virgil
Virgil reached its high-water mark in 1921 at number 98, and has been recorded 73,453 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,409th. About 23,000 Virgils are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 64.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Virgil boys named Virgil
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 73,453
- Estimated living today
- 23,000
- Median age today
- 64
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 98th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,409th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 1,444 / 72,009
How old the living Virgils are
born that year still alive today
Of the 73,453 babies given the name since 1880, about 23,000 are alive — 31 in every hundred. Roughly 1,500 of them are children and 11,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1961 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 Middle English Vyrgyle, from Latin Virgilius, from the Roman clan name Vergilius, from ett and of unknown meaning.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Virgils
- Virgil van Dijk (born 1991)Dutch association football player
- Virgil Abloh (1980–2021)American fashion designer
- Virgil Widrich (born 1967)Austrian director and scriptwriter
- Virgil Thomson (1896–1989)American composer and critic
- Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu (1916–1992)Romanian writer
- Virgil Misidjan (born 1993)Dutch-Surinamese association football player
- Virgil Donati (born 1958)Australian drummer, composer and producer
- Virgil Hill (born 1964)American boxer
People named Virgil with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Virgil is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Virgil is most concentrated in West Virginia (3.7×), South Dakota (3.7×), Kansas (3.4×), Kentucky (3.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular boys’ names the year Virgil peaked:
Virgil elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Virgil | 2,105 | 500th |
| Belgium boys | Virgil | 38 | 768th |
| England and Wales boys | Virgil | 20 | 3,523rd |
| Ireland boys | Virgil | 4 | 293rd |
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.
Virgil: rank by region
In 2000, Virgil was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wallonia | Virgil | 416 | 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.
Virgil 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 | Virgil | — | 7 |
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.
Where Virgil lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 313 men called Virgil were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Men: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lleida | Virgil | 15 | 0.064 | 1,070 |
| Castellón/Castelló | Virgil | 20 | 0.064 | 1,001 |
| Cuenca | Virgil | 6 | 0.059 | 930 |
| Guadalajara | Virgil | 8 | 0.055 | 959 |
| Zaragoza | Virgil | 24 | 0.049 | 1,161 |
| Burgos | Virgil | 5 | 0.028 | 1,579 |
Listed in 18 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 34 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.
Related names
Virgil 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.