Baby names of 1959

Mary and Michael topped the lists in 1959, out of 4,157,980 births recorded across 10,607 different names. That is 0.6% more than the 1958 files hold. About 3.3 million of them are alive today.

← 1958 All years 1960 →

Girls

#	Name	Births
1	Mary	54,502
2	Susan	41,617
3	Linda	40,410
4	Karen	36,784
5	Donna	36,468
6	Patricia	35,223
7	Debra	31,388
8	Cynthia	30,186
9	Deborah	29,546
10	Lisa	25,699
11	Barbara	25,359
12	Pamela	24,714
13	Sandra	23,359
14	Nancy	23,079
15	Kathy	21,814
16	Brenda	21,424
17	Sharon	21,292
18	Cheryl	20,947
19	Diane	19,972
20	Debbie	19,540
21	Elizabeth	18,421
22	Carol	18,140
23	Kathleen	17,629
24	Teresa	17,400
25	Cindy	16,973

All 200 girls’ names of 1959 (7,202 recorded)

Boys

#	Name	Births
1	Michael	85,294
2	David	83,977
3	James	78,648
4	John	76,446
5	Robert	74,542
6	Mark	56,945
7	William	51,386
8	Richard	47,202
9	Thomas	40,296
10	Steven	33,597
11	Charles	30,797
12	Timothy	30,783
13	Joseph	29,539
14	Kevin	26,790
15	Kenneth	26,640
16	Jeffrey	26,281
17	Paul	25,712
18	Daniel	25,155
19	Donald	23,876
20	Gary	23,303
21	Ronald	23,114
22	Brian	20,737
23	Gregory	19,889
24	Scott	19,765
25	Larry	18,434

All 200 boys’ names of 1959 (4,572 recorded)

Biggest climbers, girls

Names that gained the most ground on 1958:

Alesia #1,985 → #895 +1,090
Tori #1,791 → #843 +948
Taryn #1,211 → #771 +440
Venus #1,007 → #570 +437
Vilma #1,364 → #971 +393
Gigi #925 → #630 +295
Bridgett #1,095 → #811 +284
Tari #1,240 → #971 +269

Biggest climbers, boys

Names that gained the most ground on 1958:

Efrem #3,033 → #825 +2,208
Darin #1,677 → #776 +901
Yancy #1,557 → #686 +871
Raynard #1,677 → #969 +708
Darrin #1,396 → #752 +644
Fabian #1,222 → #607 +615
Bartley #1,511 → #926 +585
Daren #1,305 → #817 +488

First recorded in 1959, girls

Names the SSA had never published before 1959:

First recorded in 1959, boys

Names the SSA had never published before 1959:

Rowdy 22
Shulem 13
Ronan 10
Shmiel 10
Skylar 10
Anil 9
Juergen 9
Effrem 9
Jerardo 9
Jacoby 9

Skylar is here because the boys’ file records it: the SSA publishes every name given to five or more babies of one sex, and a rank is a position within that list. It is not a claim about whose name it is.

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.