Humanverse

Mervin

Mervin reached its high-water mark in 1920 at number 377, and has been recorded 12,360 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 2,363rd. About 5,400 Mervins are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 51.

Popularity, 1880–2025

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

girls named Mervin boys named Mervin

By the numbers

Total US births
12,360
Estimated living today
5,400
Median age today
51
Peak year
1920
Best rank
377th
Rank in 2025
2,363rd
First recorded
1880
Girls / boys
38 / 12,322

How old the living Mervins 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 12,360 babies given the name since 1880, about 5,400 are alive — 44 in every hundred. Roughly 930 of them are children and 1,800 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1974 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 Welsh

Variant of Mervyn.

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

Notable Mervins

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

Where Mervin is most common

Relative to how many babies each state records, Mervin is most concentrated in Pennsylvania (4.9×), Iowa (4.8×), Louisiana (4.0×), Nebraska (3.8×).

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

Names of 1920

The most popular boys’ names the year Mervin peaked:

All the names of 1920

Mervin elsewhere

CountrySpelling BirthsBest rank
France boys Mervin 40 2,620th
Ireland boys Mervin 37 218th
England and Wales boys Mervin 14 3,334th

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

Mervin against another name

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

Compare Mervin 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.