Gayle
Gayle reached its high-water mark in 1951 at number 124, and has been recorded 66,308 times in all. It has not appeared in the national data since 2024. About 45,000 Gayles are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 70.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Gayle boys named Gayle
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 66,308
- Estimated living today
- 45,000
- Median age today
- 70
- Peak year
- 1951
- Best rank
- 124th
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1891
- Girls / boys
- 61,357 / 4,951
How old the living Gayles are
born that year still alive today
Of the 66,308 babies given the name since 1891, about 45,000 are alive — 68 in every hundred. Roughly 110 of them are children and 33,000 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 a surname
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Gayles
- Gayle Rubin (born 1949)American cultural anthropologist, activist, and feminist
- Gayle (born 2004)American singer-songwriter
- Gayle Hunnicutt (1943–2023)American actress
- Gayle Forman (born 1970)American young-adult fiction author
- Gayle King (born 1954)American television personality, author and broadcast journalist for CBS News
- Gayle Rankin (born 1989)Scottish actress
- Gayle Broughton (born 1996)New Zealand rugby union player
People named Gayle with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Gayle is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Gayle is most concentrated in Hawaii (2.6×), Montana (2.4×), North Dakota (2.3×), Minnesota (2.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1951
The most popular girls’ names the year Gayle peaked:
Gayle elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland girls | Gayle | 1,243 | 67th |
| Ireland girls | Gayle | 134 | 283rd |
| England and Wales girls | Gayle | 9 | 1,755th |
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
Gayle 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.