Fern
Fern reached its high-water mark in 1918 at number 164, and has been recorded 38,195 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,219th. About 7,900 Ferns are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 70.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Fern boys named Fern
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 38,195
- Estimated living today
- 7,900
- Median age today
- 70
- Peak year
- 1918
- Best rank
- 164th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,219th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 37,666 / 529
How old the living Ferns are
born that year still alive today
Of the 38,195 babies given the name since 1880, about 7,900 are alive — 21 in every hundred. Roughly 1,700 of them are children and 4,800 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
From fern; in the case of the surname, it was given to someone who lived in a place where there was an abundance of these plants.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Ferns
- Fern Andra (1894–1974)American actress
- Fern Emmett (1896–1946)actress
People named Fern with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Fern is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Fern is most concentrated in North Dakota (7.1×), South Dakota (6.0×), Nebraska (5.1×), Kansas (4.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1918
The most popular girls’ names the year Fern peaked:
Fern elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Fern | 3,074 | 233rd |
| Scotland girls | Fern | 558 | 122nd |
| Ireland girls | Fern | 68 | 544th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Fern | 13 | 328th |
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
Fern 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.