Morton
Morton is a boy's name that peaked in 1923, when it was the 254th most popular in the United States. It has not appeared in the national data since 2021. About 1,700 Mortons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 76.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Morton boys named Morton
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 12,341
- Estimated living today
- 1,700
- Median age today
- 76
- Peak year
- 1923
- Best rank
- 254th
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 5 / 12,336
How old the living Mortons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 12,341 babies given the name since 1880, about 1,700 are alive — 13 in every hundred. Roughly 50 of them are children and 1,200 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1949 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 a surname
From Old English mōr (“moor, marsh”) + tūn (“settlement”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Mortons
- Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904)British journalist and explorer
- Morton Feldman (1926–1987)American composer
- Morton Gould (1913–1996)American composer, conductor, arranger, and pianist
- Morton Betts (1847–1914)English footballer
- Morton Subotnick (born 1933)American neo-classical composer and avant-garde electronic musician
- Morton Kaplan (1921–2017)American editor
- Samuel Morton Peto (1809–1889)British politician, building contractor, railway contractor
- Morton Smith (1915–1991)American historian and academic
People named Morton with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Morton is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Morton is most concentrated in New York (6.0×), Pennsylvania (2.6×), Maryland (2.4×), New Jersey (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1923
The most popular boys’ names the year Morton peaked:
Morton elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Morton | 28 | 3,300th |
| Scotland boys | Morton | 3 | 422nd |
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
Morton 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.