Marian

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Marian boys named Marian

By the numbers

Total US births

143,295

Estimated living today

45,000

Median age today

71

Peak year

1924

Best rank

64th

Rank in 2025

1,102nd

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

141,944 / 1,351

How old the living Marians are

born that year still alive today

Of the 143,295 babies given the name since 1880, about 45,000 are alive — 32 in every hundred. Roughly 3,500 of them are children and 29,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1954 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 Hebrew

A variant of Marion, a medieval derivation of Mary, often also interpreted as a contraction of Mary and Ann, or as a variant of Mariana.

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

Notable Marians

• Marian Anderson (1897–1993)African-American contralto
• Marian Rejewski (1905–1980)Polish mathematician and cryptologist
• Marian Lupu (born 1966)Moldovan politician
• Marian Smoluchowski (1872–1917)Polish physicist
• Marian Seldes (1928–2014)American stage, film, radio, and television actress
• Marián Hossa (born 1979)Slovak ice hockey player
• Marian Jaworski (1926–2020)Polish Catholic cardinal
• Marian Gold (born 1954)German musician

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

Where Marian is most common

• PA15,724
• NY12,507
• IL8,652
• CA8,164
• OH7,827
• MI7,515
• WI4,604
• MN4,452
• TX4,431
• NJ3,839

Relative to how many babies each state records, Marian is most concentrated in North Dakota (2.7×), Pennsylvania (2.2×), South Dakota (2.1×), Montana (1.9×).

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

Names of 1924

The most popular girls’ names the year Marian peaked:

• Mary
• Dorothy
• Helen
• Betty
• Margaret
• Ruth

All the names of 1924

Marian 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.

Marian: 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.

Marian: rank by region

In 2004, Marian was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

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

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.

Marian by city

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

Marian 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 Marian lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 4,283 men called Marian and 2,478 women called Marian 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 48 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 4 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.

Women: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 49 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 3 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

• Mary
• Mark
• Margaret
• Maria
• Martha
• Marie
• Marilyn
• Martin
• Marjorie
• Marion
• Marvin
• Marcus

Marian against another name

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

• Marian vs Mary
• Marian vs Mark
• Marian vs Margaret
• Marian vs Maria
• Marian vs Martha
• Marian vs Marie

Compare Marian with a name of your own