Ernest

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Ernest boys named Ernest

By the numbers

Total US births

304,354

Estimated living today

112,000

Median age today

64

Peak year

1921

Best rank

38th

Rank in 2025

1,038th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

1,855 / 302,499

How old the living Ernests are

born that year still alive today

Of the 304,354 babies given the name since 1880, about 112,000 are alive — 37 in every hundred. Roughly 3,900 of them are children and 54,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1961 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 Germanic languages

Borrowed in the 18th century from Ernst, a medieval royal name in Germany, from Old High German ernust (“vigor, strife”), only remotely related to modern German ernst or English earnest.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Ernests

• Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)American author and journalist
• Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937)New Zealand physicist
• Ernest Lawrence (1901–1958)American nuclear physicist
• Ernest Renan (1823–1892)French philosopher and writer
• Ernest Walton (1903–1995)Irish physicist and Nobel laureate
• Ernest Borgnine (1917–2012)American actor
• Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922)Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer
• Ernest Bai Koroma (born 1953)Sierra Leonean President

People named Ernest with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Ernest is most common

• TX19,457
• CA19,134
• NY18,274
• PA14,832
• NC11,675
• OH10,766
• IL10,465
• GA9,662
• MA9,420
• MI9,116

Relative to how many babies each state records, Ernest is most concentrated in New Mexico (2.3×), Rhode Island (2.2×), South Carolina (2.1×), Vermont (2.1×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1921

The most popular boys’ names the year Ernest peaked:

• John
• Robert
• William
• James
• Charles
• George

All the names of 1921

Ernest elsewhere

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.

Ernest: births by region

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.

By canton, Ernest is most concentrated in Vaud, where 0.02% of children were given it – 28 of them.

Ernest: rank by region

In 2025, Ernest was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2023, Ernest was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Ernest was given 2 times or more in 14 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Ernest appears in the lists for Province of Luxembourg (46th), Province of Walloon Brabant (64th), Province of Namur (66th), Province of Hainaut (153rd), Province of Liège (183rd) and Brussels-Capital Region (225th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 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.

Ernest by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Ernest 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.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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.

Where Ernest lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 2,299 men called Ernest were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 18 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 34 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Ernesto
• Ernestine
• Ernie
• Erna
• Ernestina
• Ernst

Ernest against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Ernest vs Ernesto
• Ernest vs Ernestine
• Ernest vs Ernie
• Ernest vs Erna
• Ernest vs Ernestina
• Ernest vs Ernst

Compare Ernest with a name of your own