Wells
About 7,164 American babies have been named Wells since 1881, most of them around 2025. In 2025 it ranked 345th. About 6,500 Wellses are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 4.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Wells boys named Wells
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 7,164
- Estimated living today
- 6,500
- Median age today
- 4
- Peak year
- 2025
- Best rank
- 345th
- Rank in 2025
- 345th
- First recorded
- 1881
- Girls / boys
- 175 / 6,989
How old the living Wellses are
born that year still alive today
Of the 7,164 babies given the name since 1881, about 6,500 are alive — 91 in every hundred. Roughly 6,000 of them are children and 140 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2021 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 surname
From Old English wella, genitive plural of well (“spring”), in reference to a residence near a group of springs. The original use of the genitive case here would've indicated origin. The -s ending of the modern form would be added later on upon reanalysis after the breakdown of the case system (outside of pronouns) that occurred in the development of English.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Wellss
- Junior Wells (1934–1998)American Chicago blues vocalist, harmonica player, and recording artist
- Wells Coates (1895–1958)Canadian architect
People named Wells with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Wells is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Wells is most concentrated in Utah (7.7×), South Carolina (2.4×), Colorado (2.3×), North Dakota (2.1×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2025
The most popular boys’ names the year Wells peaked:
Wells elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Wells | 7 | 4,107th |
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.
Related names
Wells 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.