Mark

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Mark boys named Mark

By the numbers

Total US births

1,366,672

Estimated living today

1.1 million

Median age today

59

Peak year

1960

Best rank

6th

Rank in 2025

244th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

4,496 / 1,362,176

How old the living Marks are

born that year still alive today

Of the 1,366,672 babies given the name since 1880, about 1.1 million are alive — 80 in every hundred. Roughly 35,000 of them are children and 337,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1966 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

From Middle English Mark, from the Latin praenomen (i.e.

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

Notable Marks

• Mark Twain (1835–1910)American author and humorist
• Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984)American Internet entrepreneur
• Mark Rutte (born 1967)Secretary General of NATO since 2024 and former Prime Minister of the Netherlands
• Mark Wahlberg (born 1971)American actor
• Mark the Evangelist (20–68)credited author of the Gospel of Mark and Christian saint; traditionally identified with John Mark (20-68)
• Mark Carney (born 1965)24th prime minister of Canada since 2025
• Mark Ruffalo (born 1967)American actor
• Mark Hamill (born 1951)American actor

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

Where Mark is most common

• CA132,874
• NY106,333
• OH85,960
• PA84,713
• IL80,052
• MI74,191
• TX72,610
• MA46,981
• IN42,094
• NJ41,214

Relative to how many babies each state records, Mark is most concentrated in Minnesota (1.5×), Wisconsin (1.5×), Delaware (1.5×), Michigan (1.4×).

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

Names of 1960

The most popular boys’ names the year Mark peaked:

• David
• Michael
• James
• John
• Robert
• Mark

All the names of 1960

Mark 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.

Mark: 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, Mark is most concentrated in Zurich, where 0.06% of children were given it – 192 of them.

Mark: rank by region

In 2025, Mark was given 5 times or more in 2 regions of Belgium.

In 2023, Mark was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Mark was given 2 times or more in 15 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Mark appears in the lists for Province of Flemish Brabant (155th), Province of West Flanders (178th), Brussels-Capital Region (187th), Province of East Flanders (264th) and Province of Antwerp (290th).

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.

Mark by city

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

Mark 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 Mark lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 4,183 men called Mark 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.

Related names

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

Mark against another name

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

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

Compare Mark with a name of your own