Leonard

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Leonard boys named Leonard

By the numbers

Total US births

295,746

Estimated living today

119,000

Median age today

64

Peak year

1921

Best rank

39th

Rank in 2025

637th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

1,412 / 294,334

How old the living Leonards are

born that year still alive today

Of the 295,746 babies given the name since 1880, about 119,000 are alive — 40 in every hundred. Roughly 7,000 of them are children and 58,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1961 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 Germanic languages

From Old French Leonard, name of a 6th century Frankish saint, from Old High German leo (“lion”) or Old High German liut (“person”) and hart (“hard”). As a surname, also used as an anglicisation of Irish Ó Leannáin (Lennon).

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

Notable Leonards

• Leonard Cohen (1934–2016)Canadian singer, songwriter and poet
• Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990)American conductor and composer
• Leonard Nimoy (1931–2015)American actor
• Arthur Leonard Schawlow (1921–1999)American physicist
• Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949)American linguist
• Leonard Susskind (born 1940)American physicist
• Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (1773–1842)Swiss economist and historian
• Leonard Woolley (1880–1960)British archaeologist

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

Where Leonard is most common

• NY32,425
• PA22,301
• IL18,449
• CA16,851
• MI13,787
• TX12,763
• OH12,548
• NJ9,420
• MA9,023
• WI6,884

Relative to how many babies each state records, Leonard is most concentrated in North Dakota (1.9×), South Dakota (1.9×), Nebraska (1.7×), Montana (1.6×).

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

Names of 1921

The most popular boys’ names the year Leonard peaked:

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

All the names of 1921

Leonard 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.

Leonard: 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, Leonard is most concentrated in Geneva, where 0.17% of children were given it – 174 of them.

Leonard: rank by region

In 2025, Leonard was given 5 times or more in 4 regions of Belgium.

In 2020, Leonard was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Leonard was given 2 times or more in 16 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Leonard appears in the lists for Province of Hainaut (Léonard, 174th) and Brussels-Capital Region (Leonard, 265th).

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.

Leonard by city

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

Leonard 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 boys in Finland this is mostly a middle name: of the 1,984 who carry it, 258 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 Leonard lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 616 men called Leonard 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 27 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 25 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

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

Leonard against another name

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

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

Compare Leonard with a name of your own