Willis
Willis reached its high-water mark in 1924 at number 136, and has been recorded 53,154 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 2,539th. About 16,000 Willises are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 62.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Willis boys named Willis
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 53,154
- Estimated living today
- 16,000
- Median age today
- 62
- Peak year
- 1924
- Best rank
- 136th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,539th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 818 / 52,336
How old the living Willises are
born that year still alive today
Of the 53,154 babies given the name since 1880, about 16,000 are alive — 31 in every hundred. Roughly 1,100 of them are children and 7,500 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1963 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
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Williss
- Willis Carrier (1876–1950)American inventor
- Willis H. O'Brien (1886–1962)American animator
- Willis Augustus Lee (1888–1945)admiral
People named Willis with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Willis is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Willis is most concentrated in Arkansas (2.5×), Mississippi (2.4×), West Virginia (2.4×), Kentucky (2.3×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1924
The most popular boys’ names the year Willis peaked:
Willis elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Willis | 249 | 1,152nd |
| France boys | Willis | 145 | 1,531st |
| Scotland boys | Willis | 3 | 707th |
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
Willis 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.