Murray
The boy's name Murray has been in the national records since 1880, with 22,299 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 2,604th. About 7,100 Murrays are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 65.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Murray boys named Murray
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 22,299
- Estimated living today
- 7,100
- Median age today
- 65
- Peak year
- 1922
- Best rank
- 206th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,604th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 391 / 21,908
How old the living Murrays are
born that year still alive today
Of the 22,299 babies given the name since 1880, about 7,100 are alive — 32 in every hundred. Roughly 830 of them are children and 3,600 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1960 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
Scottish surname derived from the place name Moray in northeastern Scotland, from Medieval Latin Moravia, Morauia, from Scottish Gaelic Moireibh, Moireabh, Moreb, ultimately from Proto-Celtic *mori (“sea”) + *trebā (“settlement”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Murrays
- Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019)American physicist
- F. Murray Abraham (born 1939)American actor
- Murray Rothbard (1926–1995)American economist
- Murray Bookchin (1921–2006)American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher
- Murray Perahia (born 1947)American pianist and conductor
- Murray Leinster (1896–1975)novelist, short story writer
- Murray Walker (1923–2021)British motorsport commentator and journalist
- Murray Rose (1939–2012)Australian swimmer, Olympic gold medalist, former world record-holder
People named Murray with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Murray is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Murray is most concentrated in New York (5.3×), Alabama (1.7×), Mississippi (1.5×), Louisiana (1.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1922
The most popular boys’ names the year Murray peaked:
Murray elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand boys | Murray | 4,843 | 16th |
| Scotland boys | Murray | 3,575 | 57th |
| England and Wales boys | Murray | 704 | 471st |
| Northern Ireland boys | Murray | 10 | 339th |
| Ireland boys | Murray | 7 | 615th |
| France boys | Murray | 5 | 3,493rd |
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.
Murray 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 | Murray | — | 7 |
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
Murray 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.