Bruce
About 388,275 American babies have been named Bruce since 1880, most of them around 1956. In 2025 it ranked 536th. About 247,000 Bruces are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 66.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Bruce boys named Bruce
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 388,275
- Estimated living today
- 247,000
- Median age today
- 66
- Peak year
- 1956
- Best rank
- 33rd
- Rank in 2025
- 536th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 1,395 / 386,880
How old the living Bruces are
born that year still alive today
Of the 388,275 babies given the name since 1880, about 247,000 are alive — 64 in every hundred. Roughly 11,000 of them are children and 139,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1959 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 a surname
From a Norman place name, Brix, of disputed meaning.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Bruces
- Bruce Lee (1940–1973)Hong Kong–American martial artist and actor
- Bruce Springsteen (born 1949)American rock singer
- Bruce Dickinson (born 1958)English heavy metal singer
- Bruce Beutler (born 1957)American immunologist and geneticist
- Robert Bruce Merrifield (1921–2006)American biochemist
- Bruce Campbell (born 1958)American actor
- Bruce Dern (born 1936)American actor
- Roger Bruce Chaffee (1935–1967)United States Navy commander, NASA astronaut
People named Bruce with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Bruce is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Bruce is most concentrated in Vermont (2.4×), Maine (2.2×), New Hampshire (2.1×), North Dakota (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1956
The most popular boys’ names the year Bruce peaked:
Bruce elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand boys | Bruce | 6,079 | 15th |
| France boys | Bruce | 2,530 | 289th |
| Scotland boys | Bruce | 1,724 | 61st |
| England and Wales boys | Bruce | 1,306 | 501st |
| Belgium boys | Bruce | 413 | 328th |
| Ireland boys | Bruce | 153 | 383rd |
| Switzerland boys | Bruce | 54 | 1,066th |
| Poland boys | Bruce | 20 birth registrations | 432nd |
| Northern Ireland boys | Bruce | 12 | 272nd |
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.
Bruce: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Bruce | 38 | 0.003% | 786th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Bruce | 13 | 0.003% | 522nd |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Bruce | 3 | 0.005% | 127th |
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.
Bruce: rank by region
In 2025, Bruce was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Bruce | 642 | 8 |
In 2020, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Bruce appears in the lists for Province of East Flanders (254th).
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Bruce 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 | Bruce | 27 | 75 |
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
Bruce 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.