Dudley
Dudley is a boy's name that peaked in 1931, when it was the 328th most popular in the United States. In 2025 it ranked 10,695th. About 4,300 Dudleys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 67.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Dudley boys named Dudley
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 11,988
- Estimated living today
- 4,300
- Median age today
- 67
- Peak year
- 1931
- Best rank
- 328th
- Rank in 2025
- 10,695th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 120 / 11,868
How old the living Dudleys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 11,988 babies given the name since 1880, about 4,300 are alive — 36 in every hundred. Roughly 160 of them are children and 2,500 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 a surname
From Old English, literally "wood or clearing of Dudda (a personal name of unknown meaning)".
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Dudleys
- Dudley R. Herschbach (born 1932)American chemist
- Dudley Moore (1935–2002)British actor, comedian, composer and musician
- Dudley Senanayake (1911–1973)Sri Lankan politician
- Dudley Pound (1877–1943)Royal Navy admiral of the fleet
- Dudley Storey (1939–2017)New Zealand rower
- Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)American screenwriter
- Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900)American writer
- Dudley North (1641–1692)English politician and businessman
People named Dudley with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Dudley is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Dudley is most concentrated in Louisiana (8.3×), Mississippi (4.8×), Kentucky (2.9×), Tennessee (2.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1931
The most popular boys’ names the year Dudley peaked:
Dudley elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Dudley | 191 | 1,704th |
| Ireland boys | Dudley | 6 | 232nd |
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.
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.