Tara
Tara reached its high-water mark in 1972 at number 38, and has been recorded 176,355 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 844th. About 168,000 Taras are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 44.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Tara boys named Tara
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 176,355
- Estimated living today
- 168,000
- Median age today
- 44
- Peak year
- 1972
- Best rank
- 38th
- Rank in 2025
- 844th
- First recorded
- 1939
- Girls / boys
- 175,812 / 543
How old the living Taras are
born that year still alive today
Of the 176,355 babies given the name since 1939, about 168,000 are alive — 95 in every hundred. Roughly 5,200 of them are children and 3,400 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1981 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 place name
genitive of Teamhair, from Old Irish Temair. The female given name is derived from the name of the plantation in Gone with the Wind, named for the place in Ireland.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Taras
- Tara Reid (born 1975)American actress
- Tara Strong (born 1973)Canadian-American actress
- Tara Lipinski (born 1982)American figure skater
- Tara Sutaria (born 1995)Indian singer and actress
- Tara Westover (born 1986)American historian and author
- Tara Davis-Woodhall (born 1999)American track and field athlete
- Tara Fitzgerald (born 1967)English actress
- Tara Sharma (born 1977)British film actress
People named Tara with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Tara is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Tara is most concentrated in New Jersey (1.7×), Alaska (1.6×), Wyoming (1.5×), Delaware (1.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1972
The most popular girls’ names the year Tara peaked:
Tara elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland girls | Tara | 7,100 | 27th |
| England and Wales girls | Tara | 5,204 | 110th |
| France girls | Tara | 3,485 | 428th |
| Switzerland girls | Tara | 1,014 | 113th |
| Scotland girls | Tara | 698 | 150th |
| Northern Ireland girls | Tara | 631 | 45th |
| Norway girls | Tara | 598 | 215th |
| New Zealand girls | Tara | 503 | 64th |
| Belgium girls | Tara | 408 | 440th |
| Italy girls | Tara | 236 | — |
| Poland girls | Tara | 33 birth registrations | 396th |
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.
Tara: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Tara | 756 | 0.061% | 110th |
| French girls | Switzerland | Tara | 224 | 0.051% | 111th |
| Italian girls | Switzerland | Tara | 33 | 0.051% | 63rd |
| Romansh girls | Switzerland | Tara | 1 | 0.027% | 4th |
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, Tara is most concentrated in Basel-Stadt, where 0.09% of children were given it – 34 of them.
Tara: rank by region
In 2025, Tara was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Tara | 584 | 8 |
In 2024, Tara was given 2 times or more in 1 region of Poland.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Małopolskie | Tara | 239 | 2 |
In 2017, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Tara appears in the lists for Brussels-Capital Region (288th).
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, 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.
Tara by city
| City | Years | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin girls | 2017–2023 | 98 | 137th |
One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.
Tara 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 | Tara | 3,162 | 3,643 |
| Finland girls | Tara | 598 | 700 |
| the Netherlands boys | Tara | — | 10 |
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.
Where Tara lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 460 women called Tara were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Women: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palmas, Las | Tara | 91 | 0.154 | 690 |
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Tara | 49 | 0.088 | 1,033 |
| Ourense | Tara | 5 | 0.032 | 1,330 |
| León | Tara | 7 | 0.030 | 1,514 |
| Balears, Illes | Tara | 19 | 0.030 | 1,847 |
| Málaga | Tara | 25 | 0.027 | 1,738 |
Listed in 22 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 30 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
Tara 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.