Erle
About 855 American babies have been named Erle since 1882, most of them around 1917. It has not appeared in the national data since 1981. About 250 Erles are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 70.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Erle
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 855
- Estimated living today
- 250
- Median age today
- 70
- Peak year
- 1917
- Best rank
- 1,291st
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1882
How old the living Erles are
born that year still alive today
Of the 855 babies given the name since 1882, about 250 are alive — 29 in every hundred. 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 English
A rare spelling variant of Earl.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Erles
- Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970)American writer and lawyer
- Erle C. Kenton (1896–1980)film director
People named Erle with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Erle is most common
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1917
The most popular boys’ names the year Erle peaked:
Erle elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Norway girls | Erle | 1,977 | 64th |
| France boys | Erle +1 spelling | 50 | 4,138th |
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.
Related names
Erle 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.