Don
Don reached its high-water mark in 1946 at number 79, and has been recorded 168,839 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,793rd. About 78,000 Dons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Don boys named Don
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 168,839
- Estimated living today
- 78,000
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1946
- Best rank
- 79th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,793rd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 1,207 / 167,632
How old the living Dons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 168,839 babies given the name since 1880, about 78,000 are alive — 46 in every hundred. Roughly 1,900 of them are children and 45,000 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.
Notable Dons
- Don Rickles (1926–2017)American stand-up comedian
- Don Cheadle (born 1964)American actor
- Don Knotts (1924–2006)American actor and stand-up comedian
- Don Ameche (1908–1993)American actor
- Don DeLillo (born 1936)American novelist, playwright and essayist
- Don Johnson (born 1949)American actor and singer
- Don Budge (1915–2000)American tennis player
- Don Siegel (1912–1991)American film director
People named Don with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Don is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Don is most concentrated in Oklahoma (2.8×), Idaho (2.7×), Utah (2.6×), Wyoming (2.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1946
The most popular boys’ names the year Don peaked:
Don elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Don | 1,425 | 244th |
| England and Wales boys | Don | 243 | 1,551st |
| Ireland boys | Don | 157 | 187th |
| Scotland boys | Don | 110 | 172nd |
| Switzerland boys | Don | 55 | 1,192nd |
| Belgium boys | Don | 19 | 1,110th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Don | 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.
Don: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Don | 50 | 0.004% | 928th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Don | 5 | 0.001% | 649th |
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.
Don: rank by region
In 2019, Don was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Don | 842 | 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.
Don 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 | Don | 57 | 87 |
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
Don 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.