Marlyn
The girl's name Marlyn has been in the national records since 1913, with 9,112 births to its name. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 5,554th. About 5,200 Marlyns are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 52.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Marlyn boys named Marlyn
Girls and boys called Marlyn
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Marlyn crossed from boys to girls in 1925, and has stayed there for 92 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 100% girls, and in 2020 it was 86%.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 100 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
- 9,112
- Estimated living today
- 5,200
- Median age today
- 52
- Peak year
- 1936
- Best rank
- 462nd
- Rank in 2025
- 5,554th
- First recorded
- 1913
- Girls / boys
- 6,806 / 2,306
How old the living Marlyns are
born that year still alive today
Of the 9,112 babies given the name since 1913, about 5,200 are alive — 57 in every hundred. Roughly 760 of them are children and 2,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1973 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.
Notable Marlyns
- Marlyn Meltzer (1922–2008)programmer for the ENIAC computer
People named Marlyn with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Marlyn is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Marlyn is most concentrated in Iowa (5.8×), North Dakota (5.7×), South Dakota (4.2×), Minnesota (4.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1936
The most popular girls’ names the year Marlyn peaked:
Marlyn elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland girls | Marlyn | 23 | 311th |
| Ireland girls | Marlyn | 8 | 406th |
| France girls | Marlyn | 5 | 1,530th |
| Switzerland boys | Marlyn | 2 | 1,916th |
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.
Marlyn: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Marlyn | 1 | 0.000% | 2,109th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Marlyn | 1 | 0.000% | 1,073rd |
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.
Related names
Marlyn 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.