Kirby
Kirby reached its high-water mark in 1957 at number 411, and has been recorded 18,495 times in all. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 3,240th. About 14,000 Kirbys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 42.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Kirby boys named Kirby
Girls and boys called Kirby
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Kirby crossed from boys to girls in 2021, having already crossed in 1983 and 1988, and has stayed there for 5 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 64% girls, which is roughly where it still is.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 114 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 18,495
- Estimated living today
- 14,000
- Median age today
- 42
- Peak year
- 1957
- Best rank
- 411th
- Rank in 2025
- 3,240th
- First recorded
- 1881
- Girls / boys
- 3,963 / 14,532
How old the living Kirbys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 18,495 babies given the name since 1881, about 14,000 are alive — 75 in every hundred. Roughly 1,500 of them are children and 3,300 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1983 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
Originally Kirkby, from "village with a church".
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Kirbys
- Edmund Kirby Smith (1824–1893)Confederate States Army general
- Kirby Howell-Baptiste (born 1987)British actress
- Kirby Bliss Blanton (born 1990)American actress
- Kirby Puckett (1960–2006)American baseball player
- Kirby Morrow (1973–2020)Canadian actor
- Kirby Grant (1911–1985)American film and television actor
- Kirby Dach (born 2001)Canadian ice hockey player
People named Kirby with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Kirby is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Kirby is most concentrated in Louisiana (4.1×), Texas (2.4×), North Carolina (2.2×), Mississippi (1.7×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1957
The most popular boys’ names the year Kirby peaked:
Kirby elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Kirby | 238 | 345th |
| England and Wales boys | Kirby | 41 | 1,591st |
| France girls | Kirby | 5 | 3,652nd |
| Ireland girls | Kirby | 3 | 517th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Kirby | 3 | 358th |
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.
Kirby 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 | Kirby | — | 5 |
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
Kirby 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.