Humanverse

Woodrow

About 39,246 American babies have been named Woodrow since 1900, most of them around 1918. In 2025 it ranked 1,644th. About 9,600 Woodrows are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 64.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 1k 2k 3k 4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Woodrow boys named Woodrow

By the numbers

Total US births
39,246
Estimated living today
9,600
Median age today
64
Peak year
1918
Best rank
58th
Rank in 2025
1,644th
First recorded
1900
Girls / boys
139 / 39,107

How old the living Woodrows are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 1k 2k 3k 4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 39,246 babies given the name since 1900, about 9,600 are alive — 25 in every hundred. Roughly 1,200 of them are children and 4,600 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 a surname

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

Notable Woodrows

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

Where Woodrow is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Woodrow is most concentrated in South Carolina (5.4×), West Virginia (4.5×), Mississippi (3.6×), Alabama (3.3×).

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

Names of 1918

The most popular boys’ names the year Woodrow peaked:

All the names of 1918

Woodrow elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
England and Wales boys Woodrow 354 1,042nd

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

Woodrow against another name

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

Compare Woodrow 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.