Axel

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Axel boys named Axel

By the numbers

Total US births

72,668

Estimated living today

71,000

Median age today

8

Peak year

2020

Best rank

72nd

Rank in 2025

79th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

209 / 72,459

How old the living Axels are

born that year still alive today

Of the 72,668 babies given the name since 1880, about 71,000 are alive — 98 in every hundred. Roughly 61,000 of them are children and 120 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2017 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 Germanic languages

From Danish Aksel, first used for the bishop and statesman Absalon Hvide (1128–1201), from biblical Absalom. Some sources suggest that the bishop was originally named Áskell, from Old Norse "god" + "cauldron, helmet", and Absalon was chosen as the nearest-sounding Christian equivalent, leading to the exchange of the middle consonants.

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

Notable Axels

• Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864–1931)Swedish poet
• Axel Witsel (born 1989)Belgian association football player
• Axel Munthe (1857–1949)Swedish physician
• Axel Oxenstierna (1583–1654)Swedish statesman
• Axel Rodrigues de Arruda (born 1970)Brazilian association football player
• Axel Disasi (born 1998)French footballer
• Axel Tuanzebe (born 1997)DR Congolese footballer
• Axel Paulsen (1855–1938)Norwegian figure skater and speed skater

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

Where Axel is most common

• CA12,013
• TX11,518
• NY3,505
• FL3,321
• IL2,926
• AZ2,275
• GA2,248
• NC2,244
• NJ1,601
• CO1,536

Relative to how many babies each state records, Axel is most concentrated in Nevada (3.7×), Arizona (2.6×), Texas (2.1×), Colorado (1.8×).

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

Names of 2020

The most popular boys’ names the year Axel peaked:

• Liam
• Noah
• Oliver
• Elijah
• William
• James

All the names of 2020

Axel elsewhere

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.

Axel: births by region

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.

By canton, Axel is most concentrated in Jura, where 0.33% of children were given it – 48 of them.

Axel: rank by region

In 2025, Axel was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2024, Axel was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Axel was given 2 times or more in 2 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Axel appears in the lists for Province of Luxembourg (46th) and Brussels-Capital Region (225th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Axel by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Axel 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.

A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026, the Netherlands on 1 January 2018 – 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.

Where Axel lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 7,207 men called Axel were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 50 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 2 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Axell

Axel against another name

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

• Axel vs Axell

Compare Axel with a name of your own