Humanverse

Lana

Lana reached its high-water mark in 1948 at number 188, and has been recorded 57,449 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 406th. About 49,000 Lanas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 48.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 400 800 1.2k 1.6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Lana boys named Lana

By the numbers

Total US births
57,449
Estimated living today
49,000
Median age today
48
Peak year
1948
Best rank
188th
Rank in 2025
406th
First recorded
1885
Girls / boys
57,434 / 15

How old the living Lanas are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 400 800 1.2k 1.6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 57,449 babies given the name since 1885, about 49,000 are alive — 86 in every hundred. Roughly 14,000 of them are children and 14,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1977 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 Russian

Short form of Alana, or from Russian Ла́на, diminutive of several names including Светла́на.

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

Notable Lanas

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

Where Lana is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Lana is most concentrated in South Dakota (1.9×), North Dakota (1.7×), Indiana (1.7×), Kentucky (1.6×).

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

Names of 1948

The most popular girls’ names the year Lana peaked:

All the names of 1948

Lana elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
France girls Lana 28,055 32nd
England and Wales girls Lana 5,242 208th
Belgium girls Lana 1,943 79th
Switzerland girls Lana 1,359 77th
Scotland girls Lana 940 149th
Ireland girls Lana 588 174th
Norway girls Lana 476 186th
Northern Ireland girls Lana 285 123rd
Poland girls Lana 69 birth registrations 372nd
France boys Lana 5 5,060th

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.

Lana: births by region

RegionCountry Spelling BirthsShare of the region Best rank
German girls Switzerland Lana 744 0.060% 116th
French girls Switzerland Lana 607 0.140% 35th
Italian girls Switzerland Lana 6 0.009% 152nd
Romansh girls Switzerland Lana 2 0.054% 1st

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, Lana is most concentrated in Jura, where 0.23% of children were given it – 34 of them.

Lana: rank by region

In 2025, Lana was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

Region Spelling Place Children
Flanders Lana 329 16
Wallonia Lana 452 5
Brussels Lana 194 6

In 2025, Lana was given 2 times or more in 2 regions of Poland.

Region Spelling Place Children
Pomorskie Lana 180 3
Śląskie Lana 255 2

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Lana appears in the lists for Province of Liège (157th), Brussels-Capital Region (194th) and Province of Antwerp (276th).

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

Lana by city

CityYears BirthsBest rank
Berlin girls 2017–2023 160 113th

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Lana 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 girls Lana 2,558 2,829
Finland girls Lana 135 148

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 Lana lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 319 women called Lana 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

Province Spelling People Per thousand Place there
Girona Lana 16 0.039 1,527
Málaga Lana 26 0.028 1,688
Barcelona Lana 76 0.025 1,898
Alicante/Alacant Lana 20 0.019 2,513
Valencia/València Lana 26 0.018 2,215
Tarragona Lana 8 0.018 2,438

Listed in 16 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 36 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.

Related names

Lana against another name

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

Compare Lana with a name of your own

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.