Dawn
The girl's name Dawn has been in the national records since 1888, with 290,680 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 2,173rd. About 256,000 Dawns are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 56.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Dawn boys named Dawn
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 290,680
- Estimated living today
- 256,000
- Median age today
- 56
- Peak year
- 1970
- Best rank
- 16th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,173rd
- First recorded
- 1888
- Girls / boys
- 289,641 / 1,039
How old the living Dawns are
born that year still alive today
Of the 290,680 babies given the name since 1888, about 256,000 are alive — 88 in every hundred. Roughly 1,700 of them are children and 45,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1969 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 English
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Dawns
- Dawn Fraser (born 1937)Australian swimmer and politician
- Dawn French (born 1957)British actress, comedian and writer
- Dawn Wells (1938–2020)American actress
- Dawn Harper-Nelson (born 1984)American hurdler
- Dawn Staley (born 1970)American basketball player and coach
- Linsey Dawn McKenzie (born 1978)British pornographic film actress
- Dawn Olivieri (born 1981)American actress
- Dawn Addams (1930–1985)British actress
People named Dawn with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Dawn is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Dawn is most concentrated in Delaware (2.1×), Wisconsin (2.1×), Michigan (2.0×), South Dakota (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1970
The most popular girls’ names the year Dawn peaked:
Dawn elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland girls | Dawn | 2,686 | 49th |
| Ireland girls | Dawn | 1,215 | 124th |
| England and Wales girls | Dawn | 380 | 620th |
| France girls | Dawn | 125 | 809th |
| New Zealand girls | Dawn | 62 | 95th |
| Ireland boys | Dawn | 16 | 242nd |
| Northern Ireland girls | Dawn | 14 | 252nd |
| Switzerland girls | Dawn | 3 | 1,792nd |
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.
Dawn: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Dawn | 2 | 0.000% | 993rd |
| French girls | Switzerland | Dawn | 1 | 0.000% | 1,042nd |
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.
Dawn 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 girls | Dawn | 5 | 43 |
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
Dawn 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.