Clifford
Clifford is a boy's name that peaked in 1925, when it was the 59th most popular in the United States. In 2025 it ranked 1,352nd. About 79,000 Cliffords are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 63.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Clifford boys named Clifford
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 190,268
- Estimated living today
- 79,000
- Median age today
- 63
- Peak year
- 1925
- Best rank
- 59th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,352nd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 2,019 / 188,249
How old the living Cliffords are
born that year still alive today
Of the 190,268 babies given the name since 1880, about 79,000 are alive — 42 in every hundred. Roughly 2,500 of them are children and 37,000 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 a surname
From Old English clif (“cliff”) + ford (“ford”), a dweller at the ford by the steep bank.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Cliffords
- Clifford Shull (1915–2001)American physicist
- Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988)American writer, journalist
- Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972)American writer who hosted a literary salon at her home in Paris
- Clifford Geertz (1926–2006)American anthropologist
- Clifford Brown (1930–1956)American jazz musician
- Clifford Odets (1906–1963)American playwright, screenwriter, and actor
- Clifford Husbands (1926–2017)Barbadian judge
- Clifford Edmund Bosworth (1928–2015)British historian and orientalist
People named Clifford with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Clifford is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Clifford is most concentrated in North Dakota (2.5×), South Dakota (2.4×), Hawaii (2.3×), Montana (2.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1925
The most popular boys’ names the year Clifford peaked:
Clifford elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland boys | Clifford | 215 | 142nd |
| England and Wales boys | Clifford | 167 | 976th |
| France boys | Clifford | 155 | 1,795th |
| Scotland boys | Clifford | 40 | 206th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Clifford | 3 | 271st |
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.
Clifford 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 | Clifford | 6 | 25 |
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
Clifford 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.