Selby
About 981 American babies have been named Selby since 1909, most of them around 1922. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 12,008th. About 550 Selbys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 32.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Selby boys named Selby
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 981
- Estimated living today
- 550
- Median age today
- 32
- Peak year
- 1922
- Best rank
- 1,545th
- Rank in 2025
- 12,008th
- First recorded
- 1909
- Girls / boys
- 293 / 688
How old the living Selbys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 981 babies given the name since 1909, about 550 are alive — 56 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1993 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
From Old Norse selja (“willow, sallow”) + býr (“settlement, farm”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Where Selby is most common
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1922
The most popular boys’ names the year Selby peaked:
Selby elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Selby | 44 | 3,017th |
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.
Related names
Selby 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.