Cathleen
Cathleen is a girl's name that peaked in 1958, when it was the 255th most popular in the United States. In 2025 it ranked 9,457th. About 24,000 Cathleens are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 63.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Cathleen boys named Cathleen
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 29,933
- Estimated living today
- 24,000
- Median age today
- 63
- Peak year
- 1958
- Best rank
- 255th
- Rank in 2025
- 9,457th
- First recorded
- 1896
- Girls / boys
- 29,923 / 10
How old the living Cathleens are
born that year still alive today
Of the 29,933 babies given the name since 1896, about 24,000 are alive — 80 in every hundred. Roughly 350 of them are children and 11,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1962 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 Irish
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Cathleens
- Cathleen Synge Morawetz (1923–2017)Canadian mathematician
- Cathleen Nesbitt (1888–1982)British actress
- Cathleen Tschirch (born 1979)German athlete and athletics coach
- Cathleen Rund (born 1977)German swimmer
- Cathleen Martini (born 1982)German bobsledder
People named Cathleen with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Cathleen is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Cathleen is most concentrated in Massachusetts (2.1×), New York (2.1×), Connecticut (2.0×), New Jersey (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1958
The most popular girls’ names the year Cathleen peaked:
Cathleen elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Cathleen | 295 | 1,092nd |
| Ireland girls | Cathleen | 61 | 262nd |
| England and Wales girls | Cathleen | 26 | 4,564th |
| Scotland girls | Cathleen | 19 | 404th |
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
Cathleen 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.