Baby names of 1944
Mary and James topped the lists in 1944, out of 2,690,098 births recorded across 8,163 different names. That is 4.7% fewer than the 1943 files hold. About 1.4 million of them are alive today.
Girls
| # | Name | Births |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mary | 62,476 |
| 2 | Barbara | 39,196 |
| 3 | Linda | 38,415 |
| 4 | Patricia | 36,874 |
| 5 | Carol | 30,456 |
| 6 | Sandra | 26,024 |
| 7 | Nancy | 23,218 |
| 8 | Sharon | 22,433 |
| 9 | Judith | 22,431 |
| 10 | Betty | 19,761 |
| 11 | Carolyn | 18,670 |
| 12 | Judy | 17,119 |
| 13 | Susan | 16,330 |
| 14 | Margaret | 16,320 |
| 15 | Shirley | 16,309 |
| 16 | Karen | 15,944 |
| 17 | Donna | 15,173 |
| 18 | Joyce | 14,770 |
| 19 | Dorothy | 13,379 |
| 20 | Kathleen | 13,004 |
| 21 | Janet | 12,592 |
| 22 | Joan | 11,920 |
| 23 | Elizabeth | 11,034 |
| 24 | Diane | 10,710 |
| 25 | Gloria | 9,968 |
All 200 girls’ names of 1944 (5,243 recorded)
Boys
| # | Name | Births |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | James | 76,951 |
| 2 | Robert | 70,855 |
| 3 | John | 66,616 |
| 4 | William | 52,375 |
| 5 | Richard | 45,643 |
| 6 | David | 37,382 |
| 7 | Charles | 34,662 |
| 8 | Thomas | 31,604 |
| 9 | Michael | 26,717 |
| 10 | Ronald | 25,513 |
| 11 | Donald | 23,468 |
| 12 | Larry | 22,026 |
| 13 | Joseph | 21,176 |
| 14 | George | 20,419 |
| 15 | Gary | 20,058 |
| 16 | Kenneth | 18,093 |
| 17 | Paul | 16,661 |
| 18 | Edward | 16,482 |
| 19 | Jerry | 16,282 |
| 20 | Dennis | 13,676 |
| 21 | Frank | 11,340 |
| 22 | Raymond | 10,635 |
| 23 | Roger | 10,581 |
| 24 | Gerald | 10,023 |
| 25 | Daniel | 9,314 |
All 200 boys’ names of 1944 (3,909 recorded)
Biggest climbers, girls
Names that gained the most ground on 1943:
Biggest climbers, boys
Names that gained the most ground on 1943:
First recorded in 1944, girls
Names the SSA had never published before 1944:
First recorded in 1944, boys
Names the SSA had never published before 1944:
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration national baby-name files. Names given to fewer than five babies in a year are not published, so the totals here run below the true number of births. How far below is not the same in every year: the files hold 201,484 births for 1880 and 3,315,343 for 2025, so a change from one year to the next in the early decades is partly a change in what the record covers.