Akira
Akira reached its high-water mark in 2008 at number 707, and has been recorded 9,837 times in all. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 983rd. About 9,200 Akiras are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 16.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Akira boys named Akira
Girls and boys called Akira
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Akira crossed from boys to girls in 1982, and has stayed there for 44 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 94% girls, and in 2025 it was 83%.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 57 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
- 9,837
- Estimated living today
- 9,200
- Median age today
- 16
- Peak year
- 2008
- Best rank
- 707th
- Rank in 2025
- 983rd
- First recorded
- 1913
- Girls / boys
- 7,817 / 2,020
How old the living Akiras are
born that year still alive today
Of the 9,837 babies given the name since 1913, about 9,200 are alive — 93 in every hundred. Roughly 5,300 of them are children and 17 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2009 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 Japanese
Borrowed from Japanese あきら.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Akiras
- Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998)Japanese filmmaker
- Akira Toriyama (1955–2024)Japanese manga artist and character designer
- Akira Suzuki (born 1930)Japanese chemist
- Akira Yoshino (born 1948)Japanese engineer and researcher (1948-), known as an inventor of lithium-ion battery
- Akira Nishino (born 1955)Japanese association football player and manager
- Akira Kaji (born 1980)Japanese association football player
- Akira Narahashi (born 1971)Japanese association football player
- Akira Kitaguchi (born 1935)Japanese association football player
People named Akira with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Akira is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Akira is most concentrated in Hawaii (9.4×), Georgia (2.2×), California (2.0×), Virginia (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2008
The most popular girls’ names the year Akira peaked:
Akira elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Akira | 595 | 760th |
| France boys | Akira | 230 | 1,546th |
| England and Wales boys | Akira | 221 | 1,456th |
| France girls | Akira | 100 | 1,809th |
| Switzerland boys | Akira | 63 | 1,020th |
| Scotland girls | Akira | 17 | 566th |
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.
Akira: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Akira | 41 | 0.003% | 891st |
| French boys | Switzerland | Akira | 22 | 0.005% | 417th |
Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.
Akira 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 | Akira | 24 | 48 |
| Finland girls | Akira | 12 | 21 |
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.
Related names
Akira 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.