Ophelia

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Ophelia boys named Ophelia

By the numbers

Total US births

25,785

Estimated living today

15,000

Median age today

7

Peak year

2024

Best rank

259th

Rank in 2025

264th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

25,770 / 15

How old the living Ophelias are

born that year still alive today

Of the 25,785 babies given the name since 1880, about 15,000 are alive — 58 in every hundred. Roughly 11,000 of them are children and 2,500 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 Ancient Greek

Borrowed from Italian Ofelia, coined by the poet Jacopo Sannazaro in his poem Arcadia (1504), probably. The name was used by William Shakespeare for the daugher of Polonius and ill-fated love interest of Hamlet. The moon (of Uranus) is named after this character.

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

Notable Ophelias

• Ophelia Lovibond (born 1986)English actress
• Ophelia Hayford (born 1973)Ghanaian politician
• Ophelia Crossland (born 1983)Ghanaian fashion designer and businesswoman
• Ophelia Pastrana (born 1982)Colombian-Mexican YouTuber

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

Where Ophelia is most common

• TX2,031
• CA1,600
• GA1,181
• NC1,068
• LA961
• AL912
• MS822
• TN807
• SC800
• FL767

Relative to how many babies each state records, Ophelia is most concentrated in Mississippi (3.3×), Arkansas (3.0×), South Carolina (2.8×), Louisiana (2.7×).

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

Names of 2024

The most popular girls’ names the year Ophelia peaked:

• Olivia
• Emma
• Amelia
• Charlotte
• Mia
• Sophia

All the names of 2024

Ophelia 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.

Ophelia: 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, Ophelia is most concentrated in Zurich, where 0.01% of children were given it – 36 of them.

Ophelia: rank by region

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

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Ophelia appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (326th).

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.

Ophelia by city

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

Ophelia 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.