Yancy
The boy's name Yancy has been in the national records since 1886, with 2,951 births to its name. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 10,695th. About 2,400 Yancys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 44.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Yancy boys named Yancy
Girls and boys called Yancy
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Yancy crossed from boys to girls in 2004, and has stayed there for 6 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 63% girls, and in 2014 it was 56%.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 52 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,951
- Estimated living today
- 2,400
- Median age today
- 44
- Peak year
- 1959
- Best rank
- 686th
- Rank in 2025
- 10,695th
- First recorded
- 1886
- Girls / boys
- 518 / 2,433
How old the living Yancys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,951 babies given the name since 1886, about 2,400 are alive — 82 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1981 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 Yancys
- Yancy Butler (born 1970)American television and film actress
People named Yancy with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Yancy is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Yancy is most concentrated in Louisiana (4.7×), California (3.1×), Texas (2.8×), New York (2.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1959
The most popular boys’ names the year Yancy peaked:
Yancy elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Yancy | 15 | 4,354th |
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
Yancy 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.