Baby names of 1939

Mary and Robert topped the lists in 1939, out of 2,203,464 births recorded across 7,942 different names. That is 0.4% fewer than the 1938 files hold. About 752,000 of them are alive today.

← 1938 All years 1940 →

Girls

#	Name	Births
1	Mary	54,900
2	Barbara	37,257
3	Patricia	29,701
4	Betty	23,639
5	Shirley	20,447
6	Carol	20,166
7	Nancy	19,723
8	Judith	16,625
9	Dorothy	15,169
10	Margaret	14,949
11	Joan	14,143
12	Joyce	13,394
13	Sandra	11,970
14	Carolyn	11,290
15	Linda	10,713
16	Helen	10,420
17	Janet	10,120
18	Elizabeth	9,709
19	Marilyn	9,538
20	Donna	9,371
21	Virginia	9,227
22	Ruth	9,062
23	Sharon	9,014
24	Janice	8,778
25	Beverly	8,706

All 200 girls’ names of 1939 (4,950 recorded)

Boys

#	Name	Births
1	Robert	59,666
2	James	59,636
3	John	51,025
4	William	42,071
5	Richard	35,386
6	Charles	30,789
7	David	25,360
8	Donald	24,056
9	Thomas	22,129
10	Ronald	19,837
11	George	17,886
12	Joseph	17,722
13	Kenneth	14,715
14	Larry	14,532
15	Edward	14,427
16	Jerry	13,729
17	Paul	13,337
18	Michael	10,828
19	Gerald	10,057
20	Frank	9,991
21	Gary	9,684
22	Raymond	9,252
23	Harold	8,299
24	Billy	7,474
25	Walter	7,322

All 200 boys’ names of 1939 (3,968 recorded)

Biggest climbers, girls

Names that gained the most ground on 1938:

April #1,805 → #925 +880
Karel #1,703 → #838 +865
Hedy #1,650 → #925 +725
Vivien #1,703 → #981 +722
Karon #1,547 → #838 +709
Dotty #1,596 → #987 +609
Kristin #1,547 → #939 +608
Lana #1,140 → #727 +413

Biggest climbers, boys

Names that gained the most ground on 1938:

Alfonzo #1,439 → #976 +463
Rod #1,439 → #992 +447
Estel #1,397 → #954 +443
Cameron #1,364 → #942 +422
Turner #1,337 → #916 +421
Oran #1,310 → #900 +410
Lonzo #1,247 → #846 +401
Leonel #1,310 → #916 +394

First recorded in 1939, girls

Names the SSA had never published before 1939:

First recorded in 1939, boys

Names the SSA had never published before 1939:

Karrol is here because the boys’ file records it: the SSA publishes every name given to five or more babies of one sex, and a rank is a position within that list. It is not a claim about whose name it is.

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.