Leon

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Leon boys named Leon

By the numbers

Total US births

184,074

Estimated living today

92,000

Median age today

49

Peak year

1924

Best rank

76th

Rank in 2025

138th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

1,436 / 182,638

How old the living Leons are

born that year still alive today

Of the 184,074 babies given the name since 1880, about 92,000 are alive — 50 in every hundred. Roughly 27,000 of them are children and 30,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1976 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 Latin, Ancient Greek

Ultimately from Latin Leo and leo (“lion”), from Ancient Greek Λέων and λέων (“lion”), likely ultimately from a non-Indo-European language. Sometimes via other related languages such as French Léon and sometimes as a diminutive of related names such as Leonard and Leonardo.

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

Notable Leons

• Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)Russian Marxist revolutionary
• Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472)Italian architect and writer
• Léon Foucault (1819–1868)French physicist
• Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018)American mathematician and physicist
• Leon Cooper (1930–2024)American physicist
• Léon Blum (1872–1950)French politician
• Léon Bourgeois (1851–1925)French statesman
• Leon Goretzka (born 1995)German association football player

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

Where Leon is most common

• NY15,258
• TX11,495
• CA11,115
• PA10,306
• IL7,320
• MI6,730
• GA6,575
• FL6,323
• LA6,114
• AL6,087

Relative to how many babies each state records, Leon is most concentrated in Mississippi (2.1×), South Carolina (2.0×), Louisiana (1.9×), Alabama (1.9×).

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

Names of 1924

The most popular boys’ names the year Leon peaked:

• Robert
• John
• William
• James
• Charles
• George

All the names of 1924

Leon 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.

Leon: 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, Leon is most concentrated in Schaffhausen, where 0.73% of children were given it – 108 of them.

Leon: rank by region

In 2025, Leon was given 5 times or more in 7 regions of Belgium.

In 2024, Leon was among the 10 most common names in 2 regions of Italy.

In 2025, Leon was given 2 times or more in 16 regions of Poland, and first in 5 of them. It has come first somewhere in 4 different years.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Leon appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (Leon, 3rd), Province of West Flanders (Leon, 4th), Province of Luxembourg (Léon, 4th), Province of East Flanders (Leon, 5th), Province of Limburg (Leon, 7th), Province of Flemish Brabant (Leon, 9th), Province of Walloon Brabant (Léon, 11th), Province of Namur (Léon, 16th), Brussels-Capital Region (Léon, 17th), Province of Hainaut (Léon, 18th), Province of West Flanders (Léon, 19th), Province of Liège (Léon, 19th), Province of Limburg (Léon, 22nd), Province of East Flanders (Léon, 22nd), Province of Flemish Brabant (Léon, 26th), Province of Antwerp (Léon, 61st), Brussels-Capital Region (Leon, 79th) and Province of Liège (Leon, 147th).

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

Leon by city

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

Leon 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 – 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 Leon lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 3,962 men called Leon 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 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Leonard
• Leo
• Leona
• Leonardo
• Leola
• Leonel
• Leora
• Leota
• Leonidas
• Leonora
• Leone
• Leonor

Leon against another name

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

• Leon vs Leonard
• Leon vs Leo
• Leon vs Leona
• Leon vs Leonardo
• Leon vs Leola
• Leon vs Leonel

Compare Leon with a name of your own