Gordon
About 155,579 American babies have been named Gordon since 1880, most of them around 1952. In 2025 it ranked 1,051st. About 65,000 Gordons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 65.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Gordon boys named Gordon
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 155,579
- Estimated living today
- 65,000
- Median age today
- 65
- Peak year
- 1952
- Best rank
- 110th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,051st
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 670 / 154,909
How old the living Gordons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 155,579 babies given the name since 1880, about 65,000 are alive — 42 in every hundred. Roughly 4,000 of them are children and 34,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1960 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
If the English or Scots name is from a cel-bry language (such as owl or obt), then possibly from a cel-bry-pro compound such as.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Gordons
- Gordon Brown (born 1951)Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010
- Gordon Banks (1937–2019)English association football player
- Gordon Moore (1929–2023)American businessman, co-founder of Intel Corporation
- Gordon Ramsay (born 1966)British chef, restaurateur, and television personality
- Gordon Allport (1897–1967)American psychologist
- Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957)British prehistorian archaeologist
- Gordon Lightfoot (1938–2023)Canadian singer-songwriter
- Gordon Cooper (1927–2004)American astronaut
People named Gordon with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Gordon is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Gordon is most concentrated in North Dakota (4.2×), Vermont (4.0×), South Dakota (2.8×), Montana (2.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1952
The most popular boys’ names the year Gordon peaked:
Gordon elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland boys | Gordon | 6,336 | 25th |
| New Zealand boys | Gordon | 1,444 | 51st |
| Ireland boys | Gordon | 1,171 | 83rd |
| France boys | Gordon | 455 | 840th |
| England and Wales boys | Gordon | 372 | 661st |
| Poland boys | Gordon | 10 birth registrations | 594th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Gordon | 6 | 271st |
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.
Gordon 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 | Gordon | 11 | 67 |
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
Gordon 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.