Elmo
About 10,338 American babies have been named Elmo since 1880, most of them around 1920. It has not appeared in the national data since 2023. About 1,900 Elmos are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 70.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Elmo boys named Elmo
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 10,338
- Estimated living today
- 1,900
- Median age today
- 70
- Peak year
- 1920
- Best rank
- 279th
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 247 / 10,091
How old the living Elmos are
born that year still alive today
Of the 10,338 babies given the name since 1880, about 1,900 are alive — 18 in every hundred. Roughly 20 of them are children and 1,200 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1955 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 Italian
From an Italian contraction of Erasmo, cognate with Erasmus. Also a German short form of Elmar.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Elmos
- Elmo Lincoln (1889–1952)American film actor
- Elmo Zumwalt (1920–2000)United States Navy admiral
- Elmo Nüganen (born 1962)Estonian actor and director of both film and theatre
- Elmo Williams (1913–2015)American film editor, producer and director
People named Elmo with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Elmo is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Elmo is most concentrated in Louisiana (6.8×), Arkansas (4.7×), Kentucky (4.1×), Oklahoma (4.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1920
The most popular boys’ names the year Elmo peaked:
Elmo elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France boys | Elmo | 25 | 5,086th |
| Belgium boys | Elmo | 15 | 1,250th |
| England and Wales boys | Elmo | 8 | 3,095th |
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.
Elmo: rank by region
In 2025, Elmo was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Elmo | 914 | 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.
Elmo 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 | Elmo | 1,969 | 2,438 |
| Finland girls | Elmo | — | 6 |
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
Elmo 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.