Vera

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Vera boys named Vera

By the numbers

Total US births

149,854

Estimated living today

49,000

Median age today

60

Peak year

1918

Best rank

68th

Rank in 2025

205th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

149,456 / 398

How old the living Veras are

born that year still alive today

Of the 149,854 babies given the name since 1880, about 49,000 are alive — 33 in every hundred. Roughly 18,000 of them are children and 21,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1965 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 Russian

Borrowed in the nineteenth century from the Russian virtue name Ве́ра (“faith”). By folk etymology it has also been explained as Latin vera (“true”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Veras

• Vera Farmiga (born 1973)American actress
• Vera Rubin (1928–2016)American astronomer and physicist
• Vera Mukhina (1889–1953)Soviet sculptor
• Vera Lynn (1917–2020)British singer
• Vera Zvonareva (born 1984)Russian tennis player
• Věra Čáslavská (1942–2016)Czechoslovak sports official, artistic gymnast and coach
• Vera Menchik (1906–1944)Czech chess player
• Vera Wang (born 1949)American fashion designer

People named Vera with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Vera is most common

• TX8,704
• NY7,713
• PA6,926
• IL6,475
• CA6,355
• OH5,677
• GA5,393
• AL5,135
• NC4,347
• MI4,325

Relative to how many babies each state records, Vera is most concentrated in Mississippi (2.5×), Arkansas (2.4×), Alabama (2.2×), Oklahoma (2.1×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1918

The most popular girls’ names the year Vera peaked:

• Mary
• Helen
• Dorothy
• Margaret
• Ruth
• Mildred

All the names of 1918

Vera elsewhere

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.

Vera: births by region

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, Vera is most concentrated in Lucerne, where 0.12% of children were given it – 105 of them.

Vera: rank by region

In 2025, Vera was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

In 2024, Vera was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Spain.

In 2024, Vera was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Vera was given 2 times or more in 4 regions of Poland.

In 2017, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Vera appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (334th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Spain after 10 names, Italy after 10 names, 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.

Vera by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Vera 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.

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 Vera lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 18,582 women called Vera 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

Listed in 52 of Spain's 52 provinces. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Veronica
• Vernon
• Verna
• Vern
• Vernell
• Vernice
• Verda
• Vernie
• Verne
• Verla
• Vergie
• Verona

Vera against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Vera vs Veronica
• Vera vs Vernon
• Vera vs Verna
• Vera vs Vern
• Vera vs Vernell
• Vera vs Vernice

Compare Vera with a name of your own