Velma
Velma reached its high-water mark in 1921 at number 108, and has been recorded 87,202 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 5,722nd. About 20,000 Velmas are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 74.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Velma boys named Velma
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 87,202
- Estimated living today
- 20,000
- Median age today
- 74
- Peak year
- 1921
- Best rank
- 108th
- Rank in 2025
- 5,722nd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 86,752 / 450
How old the living Velmas are
born that year still alive today
Of the 87,202 babies given the name since 1880, about 20,000 are alive — 23 in every hundred. Roughly 230 of them are children and 15,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1951 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
Coined at the end of the 19th century, by analogy with Thelma and Wilma.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Velmas
- Velma Barfield (1932–1984)American serial killer
- Velma Dunn (1918–2007)diver
People named Velma with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Velma is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Velma is most concentrated in Arkansas (4.4×), Mississippi (4.1×), Oklahoma (3.9×), Kansas (2.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1921
The most popular girls’ names the year Velma peaked:
Velma elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland girls | Velma | 3 | 503rd |
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.
Velma 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 | Velma | 73 | 81 |
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.
Related names
Velma 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.