Baby names of 1880

Mary and John topped the lists in 1880, out of 201,484 births recorded across 1,889 different names.

Girls

#	Name	Births
1	Mary	7,065
2	Anna	2,604
3	Emma	2,003
4	Elizabeth	1,939
5	Minnie	1,746
6	Margaret	1,578
7	Ida	1,472
8	Alice	1,414
9	Bertha	1,320
10	Sarah	1,288
11	Annie	1,258
12	Clara	1,226
13	Ella	1,156
14	Florence	1,063
15	Cora	1,045
16	Martha	1,040
17	Laura	1,012
18	Nellie	995
19	Grace	982
20	Carrie	949
21	Maude	859
22	Mabel	808
23	Bessie	796
24	Jennie	793
25	Gertrude	787

All 200 girls’ names of 1880 (942 recorded)

Boys

#	Name	Births
1	John	9,655
2	William	9,532
3	James	5,927
4	Charles	5,348
5	George	5,126
6	Frank	3,242
7	Joseph	2,632
8	Thomas	2,534
9	Henry	2,444
10	Robert	2,415
11	Edward	2,364
12	Harry	2,152
13	Walter	1,755
14	Arthur	1,599
15	Fred	1,569
16	Albert	1,493
17	Samuel	1,024
18	David	869
19	Louis	828
20	Joe	731
21	Clarence	730
21	Charlie	730
23	Richard	728
24	Andrew	644
25	Daniel	643

All 200 boys’ names of 1880 (1,058 recorded)

Try it on yourself

Source: US Social Security Administration national baby-name files. Names given to fewer than five babies in a year are not published, so the totals here run below the true number of births. How far below is not the same in every year: the files hold 201,484 births for 1880 and 3,315,343 for 2025, so a change from one year to the next in the early decades is partly a change in what the record covers.