Bernice
About 185,533 American babies have been named Bernice since 1880, most of them around 1921. In 2025 it ranked 4,067th. About 39,000 Bernices are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 74.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Bernice boys named Bernice
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 185,533
- Estimated living today
- 39,000
- Median age today
- 74
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 39th
- Rank in 2025
- 4,067th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 182,130 / 3,403
How old the living Bernices are
born that year still alive today
Of the 185,533 babies given the name since 1880, about 39,000 are alive — 21 in every hundred. Roughly 1,000 of them are children and 27,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1951 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 Ancient Greek
Biblical form of Berenice.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Bernices
- Bernice King (born 1963)American minister and daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.
People named Bernice with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bernice is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bernice is most concentrated in North Dakota (2.7×), Mississippi (2.6×), Alabama (2.1×), South Dakota (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular girls’ names the year Bernice peaked:
Bernice elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Bernice | 340 | 1,411th |
| Ireland girls | Bernice | 260 | 273rd |
| France girls | Bernice | 120 | 3,412th |
| Belgium girls | Bernice | 5 | 1,402nd |
| Scotland girls | Bernice | 3 | 639th |
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.
Bernice 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 girls | Bernice | 61 | 218 |
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
Bernice 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.