Kay
Kay is a girl's name that peaked in 1942, when it was the 75th most popular in the United States. In 2025 it ranked 3,903rd. About 62,000 Kays are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 73.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Kay boys named Kay
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 102,545
- Estimated living today
- 62,000
- Median age today
- 73
- Peak year
- 1942
- Best rank
- 75th
- Rank in 2025
- 3,903rd
- First recorded
- 1882
- Girls / boys
- 98,621 / 3,924
How old the living Kays are
born that year still alive today
Of the 102,545 babies given the name since 1882, about 62,000 are alive — 60 in every hundred. Roughly 950 of them are children and 46,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1952 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 Welsh
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Kays
- Kay Ivey (born 1944)Governor of Alabama since 2017
- Kay Panabaker (born 1990)American actress
- Kay Bailey Hutchison (born 1943)American politician
- Kay Kendall (1927–1959)English actress
- Kay Francis (1905–1968)American actress
- Kay Hagan (1953–2019)American politician
- Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957)English linguist, philosopher, writer
- Mary Kay Bergman (1961–1999)American voice actress
People named Kay with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Kay is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Kay is most concentrated in South Dakota (3.1×), Iowa (2.7×), Wisconsin (2.6×), Nebraska (2.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1942
The most popular girls’ names the year Kay peaked:
Kay elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand girls | Kay | 1,205 | 65th |
| Norway boys | Kay | 843 | 147th |
| Scotland girls | Kay | 566 | 133rd |
| England and Wales girls | Kay | 446 | 448th |
| Switzerland boys | Kay | 235 | 258th |
| Belgium boys | Kay | 133 | 659th |
| France boys | Kay | 45 | 5,520th |
| England and Wales boys | Kay | 26 | 3,959th |
| France girls | Kay | 25 | 6,574th |
| Ireland girls | Kay | 23 | 498th |
| Belgium girls | Kay | 17 | 902nd |
| Poland boys | Kay | 13 birth registrations | 588th |
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.
Kay: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Kay | 224 | 0.018% | 180th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Kay | 10 | 0.002% | 691st |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Kay | 1 | 0.002% | 179th |
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, Kay is most concentrated in Bern, where 0.02% of children were given it – 31 of them.
Kay: rank by region
In 2022, Kay was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Kay | 679 | 7 |
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.
Kay 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| the Netherlands boys | Kay | 3,566 | 4,087 |
| the Netherlands girls | Kay | 105 | 269 |
| Finland girls | Kay | 17 | 55 |
| Finland boys | Kay | 28 | 42 |
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.
Related names
Kay 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.