Moshe
About 18,038 American babies have been named Moshe since 1942, most of them around 2025. In 2025 it ranked 435th. About 17,000 Moshes are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 15.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Moshe boys named Moshe
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 18,038
- Estimated living today
- 17,000
- Median age today
- 15
- Peak year
- 2025
- Best rank
- 435th
- Rank in 2025
- 435th
- First recorded
- 1942
- Girls / boys
- 21 / 18,017
How old the living Moshes are
born that year still alive today
Of the 18,038 babies given the name since 1942, about 17,000 are alive — 97 in every hundred. Roughly 9,700 of them are children and 320 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2010 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 Hebrew
., sometimes conjectured to derive from Egyptian msj (“to give birth to”), a common element in Egyptian names of the form ‘[name of deity] is the one who bore him’.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Moshes
- Moshe ben Maimon (1135–1204)Medieval Jewish philosopher from Spain
- Moshe Dayan (1915–1981)Israeli military leader and politician
- Moshe Katsav (born 1945)8th President of Israel
- Moshe Sharett (1894–1965)2nd Prime Minister of Israel from 1954 to 1955
- Moshe Safdie (born 1938)Israeli-Canadian architect
- Moshe Arens (1925–2019)Israeli diplomat, member of Knesset, and professor of aeronautics
- Moshe Ya'alon (born 1950)Israeli military officer and politician
- Moshé Mizrahi (1931–2018)Israeli film director
People named Moshe with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Moshe is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Moshe is most concentrated in New York (9.1×), New Jersey (7.4×), Maryland (1.2×), Florida (0.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2025
The most popular boys’ names the year Moshe peaked:
Moshe elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Moshe | 881 | 687th |
| France boys | Moshe +1 spelling | 250 | 2,772nd |
| Belgium boys | Moshe | 152 | 804th |
| Switzerland boys | Moshe | 38 | 937th |
| Poland boys | Moshe | 2 birth registrations | 663rd |
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.
Moshe: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Moshe | 33 | 0.003% | 786th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Moshe | 4 | 0.001% | 632nd |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Moshe | 1 | 0.002% | 194th |
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, Moshe is most concentrated in Zurich, where 0.01% of children were given it – 27 of them.
Moshe: rank by region
In 2025, Moshe was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Moshe | 498 | 11 |
In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Moshe appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (163rd).
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Moshe 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.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Moshe | 6 | 15 |
A count of people on a register – 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.
Related names
Moshe 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.