Louis

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Louis boys named Louis

By the numbers

Total US births

409,317

Estimated living today

169,000

Median age today

58

Peak year

1921

Best rank

29th

Rank in 2025

249th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

2,847 / 406,470

How old the living Louises are

born that year still alive today

Of the 409,317 babies given the name since 1880, about 169,000 are alive — 41 in every hundred. Roughly 22,000 of them are children and 65,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1967 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 French

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

Notable Louiss

• Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)French chemist and microbiologist
• Louis XIV of France (1638–1715)King of France and Navarre from 1643 to 1715
• Louis Armstrong (1901–1971)American jazz musician, trumpeter and singer
• Louis XVI of France (1754–1793)King of France and Navarre from 1774 to 1791, then King of the French from 1791 to 1792
• Louis XV of France (1710–1774)King of France and Navarre 1715 to 1774
• Louis de Broglie (1892–1987)Nobel laureate credited to pioneer the discovery of wave character of matter
• Louis de Funès (1914–1983)French actor and comedian
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)French writer

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

Where Louis is most common

• NY60,004
• PA31,397
• CA24,211
• TX22,009
• NJ21,143
• IL20,510
• OH15,964
• LA15,770
• MA13,357
• MI13,173

Relative to how many babies each state records, Louis is most concentrated in Rhode Island (2.4×), Louisiana (2.3×), Connecticut (2.0×), New York (2.0×).

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

Names of 1921

The most popular boys’ names the year Louis peaked:

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

All the names of 1921

Louis 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.

Louis: 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, Louis is most concentrated in Jura, where 0.61% of children were given it – 89 of them.

Louis: rank by region

In 2025, Louis was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium. It has come first somewhere in 3 different years.

In 2024, Louis was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Louis was given 2 times or more in 6 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Louis appears in the lists for Province of Luxembourg (1st), Province of Liège (3rd), Province of Limburg (4th), Province of West Flanders (5th), Province of Namur (5th), Province of East Flanders (6th), Province of Flemish Brabant (7th), Province of Antwerp (8th), Province of Hainaut (8th), Province of Walloon Brabant (10th) and Brussels-Capital Region (48th).

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.

Louis by city

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

Louis 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 Louis lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 362 men called Louis 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 18 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 34 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

• Louise
• Lou
• Louie
• Louisa
• Lourdes
• Louella
• Louann
• Louvenia
• Louanne
• Louetta
• Louanna
• Loukas

Louis against another name

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

• Louis vs Louise
• Louis vs Lou
• Louis vs Louie
• Louis vs Louisa
• Louis vs Lourdes
• Louis vs Louella

Compare Louis with a name of your own