Dwight
Dwight is a boy's name that peaked in 1953, when it was the 122nd most popular in the United States. In 2025 it ranked 2,765th. About 49,000 Dwights are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 63.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Dwight boys named Dwight
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 78,907
- Estimated living today
- 49,000
- Median age today
- 63
- Peak year
- 1953
- Best rank
- 122nd
- Rank in 2025
- 2,765th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 320 / 78,587
How old the living Dwights are
born that year still alive today
Of the 78,907 babies given the name since 1880, about 49,000 are alive — 62 in every hundred. Roughly 1,800 of them are children and 22,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1962 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
Probably from a Middle English female name Diot, a pet form of Dionysia, the feminine form of Dionysius.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Dwights
- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)president of the United States from 1953 to 1961
- Dwight Yorke (born 1971)Trinidad and Tobago association football player
- Dwight Howard (born 1985)American basketball player
- James Dwight Dana (1813–1895)American mineralogist, scientist and zoologist
- Dwight Schultz (born 1947)American actor
- Dwight Filley Davis Sr. (1879–1945)American politician and tennis player
- Dwight Phillips (born 1977)American long jumper
- Dwight McNeil (born 1999)English association football player
People named Dwight with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Dwight is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Dwight is most concentrated in North Dakota (2.6×), North Carolina (2.1×), Kansas (2.0×), Iowa (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1953
The most popular boys’ names the year Dwight peaked:
Dwight elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Dwight | 86 | 1,851st |
| Belgium boys | Dwight | 47 | 625th |
| France boys | Dwight | 10 | 6,805th |
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.
Dwight: rank by region
In 2001, Dwight was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Dwight | 636 | 6 |
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.
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.