Bartholomew
Bartholomew reached its high-water mark in 1969 at number 880, and has been recorded 4,271 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 3,089th. About 2,700 Bartholomews are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 46.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Bartholomew
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 4,271
- Estimated living today
- 2,700
- Median age today
- 46
- Peak year
- 1969
- Best rank
- 880th
- Rank in 2025
- 3,089th
- First recorded
- 1880
How old the living Bartholomews are
born that year still alive today
Of the 4,271 babies given the name since 1880, about 2,700 are alive — 63 in every hundred. Roughly 400 of them are children and 500 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1979 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 Aramaic
From Latin Bartholomaeus, from Ancient Greek Βαρθολομαῖος, from Aramaic בר תלמי (“son of Talmai; son of Ptolemy”), from בר (“son”) and תלמי (“Talmai; Ptolemy”). It has long been unclear whether the Apostle's father was named after the biblical Talmai, king of Geshur, or one of the Greek Ptolemies, as the two originally unrelated names were conflated in Jewish Aramaic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Bartholomews
- Bartholomew the Apostle (100 BC–100)Christian apostle and martyr
- Bartholomew Roberts (1682–1722)Welsh pirate
- Bartholomew Columbus (1460–1515)Italian explorer (c. 1461 – 1515)
- Bartholomew Ogbeche (born 1984)Nigerian and French footballer
- Bartholomew Anglicus (1203–1272)13th-century scholastic scholar, author of the compendium De proprietatibus rerum
- Bartholomew Gosnold (1572–1607)English barrister, explorer, and privateer
- Bartholomew of Braga (1514–1590)Portuguese Dominican theologian
- Bartholomew Ulufa'alu (1939–2007)Prime Minister of Solomon Islands
People named Bartholomew with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bartholomew is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bartholomew is most concentrated in New York (6.2×), Massachusetts (3.1×), New Jersey (2.4×), Pennsylvania (2.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1969
The most popular boys’ names the year Bartholomew peaked:
Bartholomew elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland boys | Bartholomew | 504 | 81st |
| England and Wales boys | Bartholomew | 226 | 1,052nd |
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
Bartholomew 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.