Guy

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Guy boys named Guy

By the numbers

Total US births

91,102

Estimated living today

46,000

Median age today

62

Peak year

1957

Best rank

149th

Rank in 2025

1,634th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

470 / 90,632

How old the living Guys are

born that year still alive today

Of the 91,102 babies given the name since 1880, about 46,000 are alive — 51 in every hundred. Roughly 2,500 of them are children and 20,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1963 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

from a Frankish form of Proto-West Germanic *Widō (compare Old Dutch Wido), a short form of names beginning with the element *widu (“wood”), from Proto-Germanic *widuz; see for example modern German Witold and Old Saxon Widukind. Cognate with Italian Guido and thus. More at wood.

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

Notable Guys

• Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893)French writer
• Guy Fawkes (1570–1606)English member of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605
• Guy Ritchie (born 1968)English filmmaker
• Guy Verhofstadt (born 1953)Prime Minister of Belgium from 1999 to 2008
• Guy Pearce (born 1967)Australian actor
• Guy Debord (1931–1994)French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker
• Guy of Lusignan (1129–1194)French Poitevin knight and King of Jerusalem by right of marriage (c.1150–1194) (r. 1186–1192)
• Guy III of Spoleto (855–894)Holy Roman Emperor from 891 to 894

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

Where Guy is most common

• NY6,844
• CA6,658
• PA5,116
• TX4,993
• IL3,911
• OH3,437
• MI2,942
• NJ2,389
• NC2,303
• GA2,223

Relative to how many babies each state records, Guy is most concentrated in Hawaii (3.6×), Maine (2.4×), West Virginia (1.8×), Vermont (1.4×).

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

Names of 1957

The most popular boys’ names the year Guy peaked:

• Michael
• James
• David
• Robert
• John
• William

All the names of 1957

Guy 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.

Guy: rank by region

In 2001, Guy was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.

Guy 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 – 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 Guy lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 197 men called Guy 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 7 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 45 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.