Thelma
Thelma is a girl's name that peaked in 1921, when it was the 30th most popular in the United States. In 2025 it ranked 4,661st. About 41,000 Thelmas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 77.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Thelma boys named Thelma
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 226,602
- Estimated living today
- 41,000
- Median age today
- 77
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 30th
- Rank in 2025
- 4,661st
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 225,460 / 1,142
How old the living Thelmas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 226,602 babies given the name since 1880, about 41,000 are alive — 18 in every hundred. Roughly 470 of them are children and 31,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1948 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 coined name
A literary invention, first appeared in the novel Kyrkoinvigningen i Hammarby (1840-1841) by Emilie Flygare-Carlén, translated into English as "The Magic Goblet" (1845). Similar names of ambiguous origin, Elma, Selma, Velma, appeared in the 19th century.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Thelmas
- Thelma Ritter (1902–1969)American actress and vaudevillian
- Thelma Schoonmaker (born 1940)American film editor
- Thelma Todd (1906–1935)American actress
- Thelma Coyne Long (1918–2015)Australian tennis player
- Thelma Hopkins (1936–2025)British athlete
- Thelma Houston (born 1946)American singer
- Thelma Aldana (born 1955)Guatemalan judge
- Thelma Estrin (1924–2014)American computer scientist and engineer
People named Thelma with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Thelma is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Thelma is most concentrated in West Virginia (3.1×), Kentucky (2.6×), Arkansas (2.6×), South Carolina (2.4×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular girls’ names the year Thelma peaked:
Thelma elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| France girls | Thelma | 3,985 | 194th |
| Norway girls | Thelma | 587 | 133rd |
| Belgium girls | Thelma | 246 | 383rd |
| Ireland girls | Thelma | 228 | 232nd |
| England and Wales girls | Thelma | 117 | 2,605th |
| Switzerland girls | Thelma | 95 | 577th |
| Scotland girls | Thelma | 3 | 516th |
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.
Thelma: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German girls | Switzerland | Thelma | 9 | 0.001% | 1,126th |
| French girls | Switzerland | Thelma | 85 | 0.020% | 162nd |
| Italian girls | Switzerland | Thelma | 1 | 0.002% | 192nd |
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, Thelma is most concentrated in Vaud, where 0.02% of children were given it – 36 of them.
Thelma: rank by region
In 2025, Thelma was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Thelma | 450 | 11 |
| Wallonia | Thelma | 327 | 8 |
| Brussels | Thelma | 244 | 5 |
In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Thelma appears in the lists for Brussels-Capital Region (244th) and Province of Antwerp (276th).
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.
Thelma by city
| City | Years | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin girls | 2017–2023 | 2 | 548th |
One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.
Thelma 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 girls | Thelma | 189 | 236 |
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 Thelma lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 281 women called Thelma 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cáceres | Thelma | 5 | 0.026 | 1,479 |
| Gipuzkoa | Thelma | 8 | 0.021 | 1,994 |
| Huelva | Thelma | 5 | 0.018 | 2,070 |
| Alicante/Alacant | Thelma | 18 | 0.018 | 2,725 |
| Tarragona | Thelma | 8 | 0.018 | 2,438 |
| Asturias | Thelma | 9 | 0.017 | 2,122 |
Listed in 14 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 38 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
Thelma 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.