Top Baby Names of the 1940s

By the Baby Name Data Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

A decade ranking answers a different question from a single-year ranking. Instead of asking which name won one particular year, it sums every recorded birth from 1940 to 1949 and asks which names dominated a whole era of naming. That smoothing matters: a name that spikes for two years and disappears can top an annual table, but it cannot top a decade table unless the spike is enormous, while a name that finishes second or third almost every year can quietly accumulate the largest ten-year total of all. In the 1940s, the file records 29,371,399 births in total, and the leaders were Mary for girls with 640,070 births (4.42 percent of all recorded girl births in the period) and James for boys with 795,767 births (5.35 percent of boy births).

The table below lists the top 50 names for each sex across the decade. Reading down it shows how deep the era's bench of popular names ran: the fiftieth girls' name still recorded 56,604 births, and the fiftieth boys' name 57,199. Comparing those fiftieth-place totals with the leaders' totals gives the shape of the decade in one glance, because a decade where the leader is only two or three times the fiftieth name is a flat, diverse naming era, while a decade where the leader is ten times larger is one dominated by a small set of choices repeated millions of times across the country.

Reading a decade table honestly

Three cautions apply to every decade page on this site. First, the totals are sums of annual counts, so they inherit the SSA's five-birth release rule for each individual year: a name recorded four times in several separate years contributes nothing in those years, which slightly understates the very smallest names but does not affect any name near the top of these tables. Second, the final period in this file, the 2020s, covers only 2020 to 2024, five years rather than ten, so its totals are naturally about half the scale of a full decade and should never be compared with earlier decades as if the spans were equal. Third, spelling is literal throughout: variant spellings remain separate entries in every year and therefore in every decade sum, exactly as the SSA publishes them.

Within those rules, decade tables are the best tool on this site for spotting turning points. When a name climbs from the bottom of one decade's top 50 to the top of the next, the annual tables inside that span usually show a steady staircase rather than a single jump, and the individual name pages linked from this table show that staircase year by year together with the name's all-time peak. The year pages give the annual detail, the state pages show the most recent geography, and the name index collects the hundred all-time leaders whose histories cross most of these decades.

Frequently asked questions

What was the most popular baby name of the 1940s?
Across 1940 to 1949, Mary led girls with 640,070 births and James led boys with 795,767 births in SSA records.

How many births do the 1940s totals cover?
The decade totals on this page sum 29,371,399 recorded births: 14,484,760 girls and 14,886,639 boys.

Disclaimer: Baby Name Data publishes statistics drawn from U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records. Figures are counts of Social Security card applications by year of birth and are shown for general information only. Counts below five in any year, sex, or state are not released by the SSA and are not estimated here. Nothing on this page is advice about what to name a child.

Data: U.S. Social Security Administration baby name records, 1880–2024, retrieved October 2026. Source: ssa.gov/oact/babynames/