Lesley
The girl's name Lesley has been in the national records since 1882, with 39,098 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 4,546th. About 34,000 Lesleys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 46.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Lesley boys named Lesley
Girls and boys called Lesley
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Lesley crossed from boys to girls in 1941, and has stayed there for 85 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 100% girls, which is roughly where it still is.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 113 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
- 39,098
- Estimated living today
- 34,000
- Median age today
- 46
- Peak year
- 1980
- Best rank
- 269th
- Rank in 2025
- 4,546th
- First recorded
- 1882
- Girls / boys
- 34,301 / 4,797
How old the living Lesleys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 39,098 babies given the name since 1882, about 34,000 are alive — 88 in every hundred. Roughly 1,800 of them are children and 4,600 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1979 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
From a placename in Aberdeenshire, originally Lesslyn, Scottish Gaelic lios cuileann (“garden of hollies”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Lesleys
- Lesley Manville (born 1956)British actress
- Lesley Gore (1946–2015)American singer
- Lesley Ann Warren (born 1946)American actress
- Lesley Roy (born 1986)Irish singer
- Lesley Ugochukwu (born 2004)French footballer
- Lesley Lokko (born 1964)Ghanaian architect and writer
- Lesley Turner Bowrey (born 1942)Australian tennis player
- Lesley Nicol (born 1953)English actress
People named Lesley with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Lesley is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Lesley is most concentrated in California (1.6×), Texas (1.5×), Kentucky (1.2×), Massachusetts (1.2×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1980
The most popular girls’ names the year Lesley peaked:
Lesley elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland girls | Lesley | 3,797 | 24th |
| New Zealand girls | Lesley | 1,453 | 37th |
| Ireland girls | Lesley | 849 | 142nd |
| England and Wales girls | Lesley | 300 | 671st |
| France girls | Lesley | 130 | 1,839th |
| Belgium girls | Lesley | 48 | 781st |
| Ireland boys | Lesley | 24 | 204th |
| Belgium boys | Lesley | 16 | 932nd |
| Northern Ireland girls | Lesley | 8 | 259th |
| England and Wales boys | Lesley | 6 | 4,805th |
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.
Lesley: rank by region
In 2003, Lesley was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Lesley | 728 | 5 |
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.
Lesley 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 | Lesley | 1,364 | 1,840 |
| the Netherlands girls | Lesley | 852 | 1,057 |
| Finland girls | Lesley | — | 6 |
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 Lesley lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 215 women called Lesley 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alicante/Alacant | Lesley | 57 | 0.055 | 1,248 |
| Almería | Lesley | 15 | 0.040 | 1,486 |
| Palmas, Las | Lesley | 23 | 0.039 | 2,064 |
| Málaga | Lesley | 35 | 0.038 | 1,404 |
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Lesley | 16 | 0.029 | 2,335 |
| Balears, Illes | Lesley | 14 | 0.022 | 2,285 |
Listed in 7 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 45 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
Lesley 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.