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Arthur: 55 Years Outside the Top 100, and Back at #87

Arthur was America's 14th most popular boy name in 1880, then spent 55 straight years outside the top 100. In 2025 it came back — here are the numbers.

Arthur reads as a 2026 name right now — soft, slightly formal, the kind of thing that turns up on a birth announcement between a Theodore and an Otto. What that reading hides is that Arthur is not returning from a dip. It spent 55 consecutive years outside the top 100, ending only last year.

The first Arthur era

Arthur is at the top of the American record from the moment the record starts. In 1880, the first year anyone counted, it was the 14th most popular boy name in the country — 1,599 babies. That is still its best rank ever, 146 years later.

It stayed there for two generations. #15 in 1900. #18 in 1915. Its biggest year by raw count was 1921: 10,527 boys, ranked #19. In 1930 it was still #23, with 8,284 boys.

For anyone born in the first third of the twentieth century, Arthur was simply a normal name — as unremarkable then as Liam is now.

The fade

What follows isn’t a collapse so much as a very long exhale. Arthur was #46 in 1950 with 7,161 boys, still top-100 but sliding. It hung on by its fingernails through the sixties — #98 in 1968, #97 in 1969 — and then, in 1970, it dropped to #111 and did not come back for the rest of the century.

The floor is 2010: 730 boys in the entire United States, ranked #388. Set against 10,527 in 1921, that is a fall of roughly 93% in raw numbers — and unlike a lot of vintage names, Arthur never quite fell out of sight. It just sat, unfashionable and unbothered, for four decades.

The return

From that 2010 floor, the climb is fast and unusually steady:

• 2015 — 1,247 boys, #292
• 2020 — 2,338 boys, #163
• 2023 — 2,832 boys, #130
• 2024 — 3,334 boys, #105
• 2025 — 3,847 boys, #87

That last line is the one that matters. Arthur’s previous top-100 finish was 1969. Its next one was 2025. In between: 55 straight years, with no exceptions anywhere in the run — every single year from 1970 through 2024 sat outside the top 100.

Arthur is up 209% in ten years, which is a steeper ten-year climb than almost anything else in its cohort. It is also still well short of where it was: #87 today versus #14 in 1880. The comeback is real and it is nowhere near finished.

The 40 names on the same curve

Arthur is not doing this alone. Here are 40 boy names — Arthur included — that were in wide use in 1915, bottomed out in the modern era, and are climbing again. The middle column is each name’s worst year on record, which is usually the most surprising number on the row.

Thirteen of the 40 went to fewer than 500 boys last year — the still-rare end of the list: Louie (481), Harlan (454), Otis (422), Hugh (360), Clyde (350), Ira (301), Alfred (293), Leroy (269), Wallace (241), Lyle (211), Ollie (207), Edmund (199), and Percy (154). If you like what Arthur is doing but want to be earlier to it, that’s the column to read.

Two rows are worth pausing on. Archie fell to #2,473 in 2007 and is at #301 now — up 673% in ten years, the steepest climb on the page. And Ollie hit #5,642 in 1997, which is about as close to gone as a name gets while still technically existing, and is back inside the top 1,100.

The names at the top of the table are the ones that already finished the journey. Oliver is #3 and Theodore is #4 — both were sitting outside the top 300 within the last forty years. That is what Arthur’s curve looks like when it keeps going, and it’s a reminder that “rare vintage find” has a shelf life.

Every count on this page is a number of real American babies, taken from the official national birth record that runs back to 1880.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.