Nellie
Nellie reached its high-water mark in 1918 at number 65, and has been recorded 153,284 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 533rd. About 26,000 Nellies are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 71.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Nellie boys named Nellie
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 153,284
- Estimated living today
- 26,000
- Median age today
- 71
- Peak year
- 1918
- Best rank
- 65th
- Rank in 2025
- 533rd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 152,691 / 593
How old the living Nellies are
born that year still alive today
Of the 153,284 babies given the name since 1880, about 26,000 are alive — 17 in every hundred. Roughly 4,900 of them are children and 15,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1954 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
Suffixed with, compare Noll and Neddie, respectively from Oliver and Edward.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Nellies
- Nellie Bly (1865–1922)American journalist
- Nellie Kim (born 1957)Soviet-Russian artistic gymnast
- Nellie Melba (1861–1931)Australian opera singer
- Nellie Tayloe Ross (1876–1977)First woman state governor in the U.S.
- Nellie McClung (1873–1951)Canadian author, social activist, suffragette & politician
- Nellie Connally (1919–2006)First Lady of Texas from 1963 to 1969
- Nellie McKay (born 1982)American musician
- Nellie Halstead (1910–1991)British athlete
People named Nellie with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Nellie is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Nellie is most concentrated in West Virginia (3.7×), Alabama (3.2×), Kentucky (2.6×), North Carolina (2.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1918
The most popular girls’ names the year Nellie peaked:
Nellie elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden girls | Nellie | 10,082 | 13th |
| England and Wales girls | Nellie | 4,548 | 97th |
| France girls | Nellie | 855 | 771st |
| Norway girls | Nellie | 308 | 146th |
| Ireland girls | Nellie | 100 | 232nd |
| Scotland girls | Nellie | 89 | 230th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Nellie | 43 | 205th |
| Belgium girls | Nellie | 32 | 787th |
| Poland girls | Nellie | 31 birth registrations | 383rd |
| Switzerland girls | Nellie | 30 | 1,143rd |
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.
Nellie: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Nellie | 21 | 0.002% | 1,032nd |
| French girls | Switzerland | Nellie | 9 | 0.002% | 637th |
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.
Nellie: rank by region
In 2024, Nellie was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Nellie | 592 | 8 |
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.
Nellie 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| the Netherlands girls | Nellie | 1,444 | 2,309 |
| Finland girls | Nellie | 199 | 215 |
| the Netherlands boys | Nellie | — | 17 |
A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, 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
Nellie 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.