Cole
About 154,646 American babies have been named Cole since 1886, most of them around 2002. In 2025 it ranked 182nd. About 151,000 Coles are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 20.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Cole boys named Cole
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 154,646
- Estimated living today
- 151,000
- Median age today
- 20
- Peak year
- 2002
- Best rank
- 69th
- Rank in 2025
- 182nd
- First recorded
- 1886
- Girls / boys
- 553 / 154,093
How old the living Coles are
born that year still alive today
Of the 154,646 babies given the name since 1886, about 151,000 are alive — 98 in every hundred. Roughly 62,000 of them are children and 560 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2005 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
A nickname from Old English col (“coal, coal-black”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Coles
- Cole Palmer (born 2002)English footballer
- Cole Porter (1891–1964)American composer and songwriter
- Cole Sprouse (born 1992)American actor
- Stephen Cole Kleene (1909–1994)American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist
- Cole Hauser (born 1975)American actor
- Cole Hocker (born 2001)American middle-distance runner
- Cole Aldrich (born 1988)American basketball player
- Cole Hamels (born 1983)American baseball player
People named Cole with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Cole is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Cole is most concentrated in Utah (2.3×), Alaska (2.2×), Montana (2.1×), North Dakota (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2002
The most popular boys’ names the year Cole peaked:
Cole elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Cole | 9,051 | 125th |
| Scotland boys | Cole | 2,436 | 43rd |
| New Zealand boys | Cole | 648 | 62nd |
| Ireland boys | Cole | 526 | 132nd |
| Northern Ireland boys | Cole | 392 | 98th |
| France boys | Cole | 100 | 2,464th |
| Switzerland boys | Cole | 18 | 1,111th |
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.
Cole: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Cole | 10 | 0.001% | 844th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Cole | 7 | 0.002% | 573rd |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Cole | 1 | 0.002% | 179th |
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.
Cole 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 | Cole | 19 | 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
Cole 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.