Humanverse

Melva

The girl's name Melva has been in the national records since 1880, with 14,185 births to its name. It has not appeared in the national data since 2024. About 5,600 Melvas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 72.

Popularity, 1880–2025

Births per year, 1880 to 2025 0 80 160 240 320 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

girls named Melva boys named Melva

By the numbers

Total US births
14,185
Estimated living today
5,600
Median age today
72
Peak year
1938
Best rank
378th
Rank in 2025
unranked
First recorded
1880
Girls / boys
14,155 / 30

How old the living Melvas are

Born with the name each year, and how many of them are alive today, 1880 to 2025 0 80 160 240 320 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

born that year still alive today

Of the 14,185 babies given the name since 1880, about 5,600 are alive — 39 in every hundred. Roughly 20 of them are children and 3,900 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1953 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 Melva is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Melva is most concentrated in Oklahoma (4.7×), Kansas (3.7×), Arkansas (2.8×), Louisiana (2.5×).

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

Names of 1938

The most popular girls’ names the year Melva peaked:

All the names of 1938

Melva elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
England and Wales girls Melva 6 3,705th

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.

Related names

Melva against another name

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

Compare Melva with a name of your own

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.