Walt
Walt reached its high-water mark in 1959 at number 838, and has been recorded 2,634 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 3,314th. About 1,700 Walts are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 53.
Popularity, 1880–2025
boys named Walt
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 2,634
- Estimated living today
- 1,700
- Median age today
- 53
- Peak year
- 1959
- Best rank
- 838th
- Rank in 2025
- 3,314th
- First recorded
- 1893
How old the living Walts are
born that year still alive today
Of the 2,634 babies given the name since 1893, about 1,700 are alive — 66 in every hundred. Roughly 520 of them are children and 530 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1972 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
. The derogatory British sense is a reference to the fictional character Walter Mitty from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a mild-mannered pushover who has wild fantasies about his life in various daring roles.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Walts
- Walt Disney (1901–1966)American animator, producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor and entrepreneur, founder of The Walt Disney Company
- Walt Whitman (1819–1892)American poet, essayist and journalist
- Walt Whitman Rostow (1916–2003)American economist, political theorist and government official
- Walt Frazier (born 1945)American basketball player
- Walt Dohrn (born 1970)American animator
- Walt Bellamy (1939–2013)American basketball player
- Walt Kelly (1913–1973)American cartoonist
- Walt Ader (1912–1982)racecar driver
People named Walt with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Walt is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Walt is most concentrated in California (3.6×), Washington (3.2×), Pennsylvania (3.0×), Ohio (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1959
The most popular boys’ names the year Walt peaked:
Walt elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Belgium boys | Walt | 205 | 383rd |
| England and Wales boys | Walt | 48 | 1,869th |
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.
Walt: rank by region
In 2025, Walt was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Walt | 290 | 20 |
In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Walt appears in the lists for Province of East Flanders (264th) and Province of Antwerp (290th).
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.
Related names
Walt 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.