Dennis

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Dennis boys named Dennis

By the numbers

Total US births

623,692

Estimated living today

408,000

Median age today

67

Peak year

1952

Best rank

18th

Rank in 2025

707th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

2,692 / 621,000

How old the living Dennises are

born that year still alive today

Of the 623,692 babies given the name since 1880, about 408,000 are alive — 65 in every hundred. Roughly 10,000 of them are children and 230,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1958 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 Ancient Greek

From Middle English Denis, from Old French saint's name Denis, brought to England by Normans; from Latin Dionysius, a masculine name literally meaning “follower of (the wine god) Dionysus”.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Denniss

• Dennis M. Ritchie (1941–2011)American computer scientist, co-inventor of the Unix operating system and the C programming language
• Dennis Gabor (1900–1979)Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography
• Dennis Hopper (1936–2010)American actor and film director
• Dennis Bergkamp (born 1969)Dutch association football player
• Dennis Quaid (born 1954)American actor
• Dennis Rodman (born 1961)American basketball player
• Dennis Tito (born 1940)American businessman
• Dennis Rommedahl (born 1978)Danish footballer

People named Dennis with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Dennis is most common

• CA52,500
• NY46,314
• PA42,444
• MI38,700
• IL37,420
• OH35,733
• WI22,665
• TX21,062
• IN19,554
• IA18,920

Relative to how many babies each state records, Dennis is most concentrated in Iowa (2.3×), South Dakota (2.1×), North Dakota (2.0×), Wisconsin (1.8×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1952

The most popular boys’ names the year Dennis peaked:

• James
• Robert
• John
• Michael
• David
• William

All the names of 1952

Dennis elsewhere

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.

Dennis: births by region

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.

By canton, Dennis is most concentrated in Ticino, where 0.08% of children were given it – 50 of them.

Dennis: rank by region

In 2023, Dennis was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

In 2018, Dennis was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2019, Dennis was given 2 times or more in 1 region of Poland.

In 2017, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Dennis appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (346th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 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.

Dennis by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Dennis 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.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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.

Where Dennis lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 1,685 men called Dennis were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 42 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 10 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Denise
• Dena
• Denver
• Denis
• Denny
• Denzel
• Denice
• Denisse
• Denton
• Dennie
• Denisha
• Denim

Dennis against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Dennis vs Denise
• Dennis vs Dena
• Dennis vs Denver
• Dennis vs Denis
• Dennis vs Denny
• Dennis vs Denzel

Compare Dennis with a name of your own