Sunil
The boy's name Sunil has been in the national records since 1962, with 989 births to its name. It has not appeared in the national data since 2019. About 920 Sunils are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 42.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Sunil
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 989
- Estimated living today
- 920
- Median age today
- 42
- Peak year
- 1979
- Best rank
- 1,435th
- Rank in 2025
- unranked
- First recorded
- 1962
How old the living Sunils are
born that year still alive today
Of the 989 babies given the name since 1962, about 920 are alive — 93 in every hundred. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1983 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 Sanskrit
From Sanskrit सुनील (“very black or blue, dark”); ultimately from सु + नील.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Sunils
- Sunil Chhetri (born 1984)Indian football player
- Sunil Dutt (1929–2005)Hindi film actor and politician
- Sunil Shetty (born 1961)Indian actor and film producer
- Sunil Gavaskar (born 1949)Indian cricket player
- Sunil Mittal (born 1957)businessperson
- Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934–2012)Award-winning and bestselling Bengali poet and author
- Sunil Grover (born 1977)Indian comedian and actor
- Sunil Narine (born 1989)West Indian cricketer
People named Sunil with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Sunil is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Sunil is most concentrated in New York (8.6×), Illinois (2.9×), California (1.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1979
The most popular boys’ names the year Sunil peaked:
Sunil elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Sunil | 177 | 620th |
| France boys | Sunil | 30 | 5,729th |
| Scotland boys | Sunil | 3 | 315th |
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.
Sunil 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 | Sunil | 11 | 15 |
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 Sunil lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 198 men called Sunil 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
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palmas, Las | Sunil | 24 | 0.041 | 1,834 |
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Sunil | 14 | 0.026 | 2,686 |
| Barcelona | Sunil | 62 | 0.021 | 2,240 |
| Girona | Sunil | 7 | 0.017 | 2,753 |
| Tarragona | Sunil | 7 | 0.016 | 2,823 |
| Alicante/Alacant | Sunil | 16 | 0.016 | 3,213 |
Listed in 7 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 45 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.
Related names
Sunil 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.