Irene

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Irene boys named Irene

By the numbers

Total US births

356,812

Estimated living today

99,000

Median age today

67

Peak year

1921

Best rank

18th

Rank in 2025

651st

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

355,462 / 1,350

How old the living Irenes are

born that year still alive today

Of the 356,812 babies given the name since 1880, about 99,000 are alive — 28 in every hundred. Roughly 8,100 of them are children and 54,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1958 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 Ancient Greek

Borrowed from French Irène, from Ancient Greek Εἰρήνη (“peace”), name of a goddess of peace, of early Christian saints, and of an 8th-century Byzantine empress.

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

Notable Irenes

• Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956)French chemist and physicist
• Irene of Athens (752–803)empress of Byzantine Empire
• Irene Papas (1929–2022)Greek actress and singer
• Irene (born 1991)South Korean singer and actress
• Irene Dunne (1898–1990)American actress and singer
• Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942)French novelist
• Irene Cara (1959–2022)American singer and actress
• Irène Jacob (born 1966)French-born Swiss actress

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

Where Irene is most common

• NY34,637
• PA25,602
• CA25,237
• TX19,339
• IL17,749
• MA13,869
• MI13,569
• OH13,002
• NJ11,392
• WI7,921

Relative to how many babies each state records, Irene is most concentrated in North Dakota (2.7×), New Hampshire (2.2×), Rhode Island (2.1×), South Dakota (2.0×).

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

Names of 1921

The most popular girls’ names the year Irene peaked:

• Mary
• Dorothy
• Helen
• Margaret
• Ruth
• Virginia

All the names of 1921

Irene 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.

Irene: 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, Irene is most concentrated in Ticino, where 0.13% of children were given it – 79 of them.

Irene: rank by region

In 2025, Irene was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

In 2015, Irene was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Spain.

In 2021, Irene was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2023, Irene was given 2 times or more in 1 region of Poland.

In 2022, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Irene appears in the lists for Province of East Flanders (184th).

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

Irene 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.

Among girls in Finland this is mostly a middle name: of the 21,427 who carry it, 2,368 go by it.

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 Irene lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 118,193 women called Irene were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Women: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Ireland
• Irena
• Irelynn
• Irelyn

Irene against another name

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

• Irene vs Ireland
• Irene vs Irena
• Irene vs Irelynn
• Irene vs Irelyn

Compare Irene with a name of your own