Clarence
The boy's name Clarence has been in the national records since 1880, with 305,423 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 1,499th. About 83,000 Clarences are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 66.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Clarence boys named Clarence
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 305,423
- Estimated living today
- 83,000
- Median age today
- 66
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 28th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,499th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 1,859 / 303,564
How old the living Clarences are
born that year still alive today
Of the 305,423 babies given the name since 1880, about 83,000 are alive — 27 in every hundred. Roughly 2,900 of them are children and 44,000 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
Originally a ducal title of the English and British royal family, from Clārensis (“from the town of Clare”), (the town of Clare, Suffolk), although it has also been associated with Italian Chiarenza, Clarentza, &c., a former fortress and settlement in the medieval Frankish Principality of Achaea in Greece.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Clarences
- Clarence Seedorf (born 1976)Dutch association football player and manager
- Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)American lawyer and politician
- Clarence Thomas (born 1948)Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991
- Clarence Brown (1890–1987)American film director
- Clarence Clemons (1942–2011)American saxophonist
- Clarence Zener (1905–1993)American physicist
- Clarence Gilyard (1955–2022)American actor
- Clarence Nash (1904–1985)American voice actor
People named Clarence with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Clarence is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Clarence is most concentrated in West Virginia (2.3×), Louisiana (2.3×), North Dakota (2.1×), Mississippi (2.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular boys’ names the year Clarence peaked:
Clarence elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Clarence | 2,100 | 478th |
| France girls | Clarence | 940 | 1,027th |
| England and Wales boys | Clarence | 160 | 1,587th |
| Belgium boys | Clarence | 12 | 1,013th |
| Belgium girls | Clarence | 5 | 1,464th |
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.
Clarence: rank by region
In 2011, Clarence was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wallonia | Clarence | 521 | 5 |
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.
Clarence 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 | Clarence | 8 | 20 |
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
Clarence 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.