Oliver

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Oliver boys named Oliver

By the numbers

Total US births

270,680

Estimated living today

231,000

Median age today

7

Peak year

2024

Best rank

3rd

Rank in 2025

3rd

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

777 / 269,903

How old the living Olivers are

born that year still alive today

Of the 270,680 babies given the name since 1880, about 231,000 are alive — 85 in every hundred. Roughly 194,000 of them are children and 7,400 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2018 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 Germanic languages

from Old French Olivier, by folk etymology derived from the Latin name Olīvārius, but probably representing an Old High German form of Old Norse Óleifr (“ancestral + relic”) (modern Danish Olaf and Swedish Olof), or Proto-Germanic *ala- (“all”) + *wēraz (“true”) (modern Swedish allvar). Name of a paladin of Charlemagne in medieval French romance.

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

Notable Olivers

• Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658)English military and political leader
• Oliver Stone (born 1946)American film director, screenwriter, and producer
• Oliver Kahn (born 1969)German association football player
• Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)Anglo-Irish writer, poet, and physician
• Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925)electrical engineer, mathematician and physicist
• Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)American poet and physician
• Oliver E. Williamson (1932–2020)American economist
• Oliver Hardy (1892–1957)American comic actor famous as one half of Laurel and Hardy

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

Where Oliver is most common

• CA28,143
• TX20,245
• NY13,777
• FL11,735
• IL10,784
• OH10,101
• PA9,114
• MI8,124
• NC8,074
• GA7,228

Relative to how many babies each state records, Oliver is most concentrated in Utah (2.1×), Nevada (2.0×), Alaska (1.9×), Idaho (1.8×).

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

Names of 2024

The most popular boys’ names the year Oliver peaked:

• Liam
• Noah
• Oliver
• Theodore
• James
• Henry

All the names of 2024

Oliver elsewhere

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.

Oliver: births by region

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, Oliver is most concentrated in Ticino, where 0.36% of children were given it – 224 of them.

Oliver: rank by region

In 2025, Oliver was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.

In 2021, Oliver was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Spain.

In 2018, Oliver was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Oliver was given 2 times or more in 15 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Oliver appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (10th), Province of Flemish Brabant (31st), Province of Limburg (38th), Province of West Flanders (42nd), Province of East Flanders (52nd), Province of Liège (117th), Province of Hainaut (174th) and Brussels-Capital Region (187th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Spain after 10 names, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 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.

Oliver by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Oliver 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.

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.

Where Oliver lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 24,392 men called Oliver were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Olivia
• Olive
• Olin
• Olivier
• Oliva
• Olinda
• Olie
• Olivette
• Oliviah
• Olivea

Oliver against another name

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

• Oliver vs Olivia
• Oliver vs Olive
• Oliver vs Olin
• Oliver vs Olivier
• Oliver vs Oliva
• Oliver vs Olinda

Compare Oliver with a name of your own