Baby names of 1954
Mary and Michael topped the lists in 1954, out of 3,980,666 births recorded across 9,882 different names. That is 3.3% more than the 1953 files hold. About 2.9 million of them are alive today.
Girls
| # | Name | Births |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mary | 68,019 |
| 2 | Linda | 55,371 |
| 3 | Deborah | 54,674 |
| 4 | Patricia | 49,149 |
| 5 | Susan | 47,162 |
| 6 | Debra | 45,896 |
| 7 | Barbara | 36,368 |
| 8 | Karen | 32,456 |
| 9 | Nancy | 30,270 |
| 10 | Cynthia | 27,615 |
| 11 | Donna | 27,429 |
| 12 | Pamela | 27,361 |
| 13 | Sandra | 26,061 |
| 14 | Kathleen | 22,455 |
| 15 | Carol | 22,247 |
| 16 | Sharon | 22,220 |
| 17 | Diane | 22,053 |
| 18 | Brenda | 19,609 |
| 19 | Janet | 18,477 |
| 20 | Elizabeth | 16,584 |
| 21 | Margaret | 15,226 |
| 22 | Cheryl | 15,015 |
| 23 | Kathy | 14,175 |
| 24 | Denise | 13,716 |
| 25 | Janice | 13,505 |
All 200 girls’ names of 1954 (6,625 recorded)
Boys
| # | Name | Births |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michael | 88,568 |
| 2 | Robert | 86,331 |
| 3 | James | 86,311 |
| 4 | John | 81,168 |
| 5 | David | 79,556 |
| 6 | William | 61,426 |
| 7 | Richard | 57,042 |
| 8 | Thomas | 47,159 |
| 9 | Gary | 37,920 |
| 10 | Charles | 37,463 |
| 11 | Steven | 36,628 |
| 12 | Mark | 36,198 |
| 13 | Joseph | 31,221 |
| 14 | Donald | 29,279 |
| 15 | Ronald | 27,625 |
| 16 | Paul | 26,220 |
| 17 | Kenneth | 26,186 |
| 18 | Daniel | 25,275 |
| 19 | Larry | 24,614 |
| 20 | Stephen | 21,878 |
| 21 | Dennis | 20,758 |
| 22 | Edward | 19,493 |
| 23 | Jeffrey | 19,052 |
| 24 | George | 18,704 |
| 25 | Gregory | 17,625 |
All 200 boys’ names of 1954 (4,360 recorded)
Biggest climbers, girls
Names that gained the most ground on 1953:
Biggest climbers, boys
Names that gained the most ground on 1953:
First recorded in 1954, girls
Names the SSA had never published before 1954:
First recorded in 1954, boys
Names the SSA had never published before 1954:
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.