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August: Back in the Top 100 After 133 Years

August left the top 100 boy names in 1891 and did not return until 2024. The SSA data behind the slowest comeback in American naming.

Most name comebacks are dramatic. A name vanishes, sits at the bottom of the list for a generation, and then rockets back so fast that the parents choosing it feel like they got there first.

August did not do that. August spent 133 years walking back up the hill.

In 1891 it was the 86th most popular boy name in America. It then left the top 100 and stayed out of it for the entire twentieth century — through two world wars, the whole baby boom, the Jennifer years, the Jayden years — before finally reappearing at #88 in 2024. In 2025 it sits at #81, with 3,958 babies.

That is the longest gap between top-100 appearances of any name we have looked at, and the shape of the curve is stranger than the headline.

It was popular before the country was

August shows up in the very first year of Social Security records. 1880: 210 babies, ranked #74 — its best rank in the entire nineteenth century, and better than where it sits today.

It held the top 100 for twelve straight years, 1880 through 1891, and then began sliding. Not falling off a cliff; sliding.

Look at 1920 for a second, because it is the quietly instructive row. There are nearly three times as many babies named August in 1920 as in 1880 — and the rank is 137 places worse. Early SSA records cover far fewer births than later ones, so raw counts and ranks tell genuinely different stories in that era. When someone tells you a name “was more popular in 1920,” ask which measure they mean.

The floor: 90 babies

August bottomed out in 1983 at 90 babies in the entire United States, ranked #930.

Ninety. That is a name you could plausibly have gone your whole childhood without encountering. And yet — this is the part that makes August unusual — it never actually left. In 146 years of Social Security data, August has appeared in the top 1,000 every single year. It is one of only 185 boy names that can say that, out of more than 4,200 in our dataset.

So the more accurate description isn’t “August disappeared and came back.” It’s that August never went away, and nobody noticed it was still there.

The climb

The recovery starts in the mid-nineties and then steepens hard:

• 1995 — 249 babies, #663
• 2005 — 343 babies, #636
• 2010 — 647 babies, #427
• 2015 — 2,093 babies, #195
• 2020 — 2,432 babies, #155
• 2023 — 3,459 babies, #104
• 2024 — 3,894 babies, #88 — the first top-100 finish since 1891
• 2025 — 3,958 babies, #81

The steepest single stretch is 2013 to 2015, when August goes from 1,043 babies to 2,093 — it doubles in two years. Over the last decade it is up 89%.

And here is the number worth sitting with: 2025 is August’s all-time high in raw count. Not its 1880s heyday, not the 1920s. Right now. More American babies were named August last year than in any year on record.

Where it goes next

Our forecast model has August continuing up: roughly 4,228 babies in 2026, and about 5,061 by 2030.

If that holds, August will spend the back half of this decade comfortably inside the top 100 — the first sustained run there since Benjamin Harrison was president.

What that means if you’re choosing it

August is not a rare name anymore, and it is worth being clear-eyed about that. At #81 and climbing, a boy named August born this year will very likely meet another one. Its uniqueness score is 21 out of 100, which puts it firmly in familiar territory.

That is not a strike against it. A name that thousands of other parents also love is a name that will be spelled correctly, pronounced correctly, and never need explaining — and plenty of people want precisely that. The only thing to avoid is choosing August because it sounds like a rediscovery. That window closed around 2018.

If the appeal is the month rather than the name, the surrounding neighborhood is worth a look: June is #150 for girls, Summer #152, Autumn #88, and Winter #426. April has gone the other way — a top-30 name in 1980, now #542.

And if what you actually like is the sound — the long vowel, the antique formality, the built-in nickname — the closer relatives are Augustus at #407 and Augustine at #546, both rarer and both rising.

The names walking the same road

August’s pattern — top-100 in the 1880s, forgotten for a century, climbing now — is not unique to it. These are all doing the same thing, just further behind:

Archie is the outlier: outside the top 1,000 as recently as 2015, now #301. That is a far faster climb than August ever managed — which is the whole point. August took 133 years because it never crashed hard enough to be rediscovered. It just kept quietly showing up until the rest of the country came back around.

For more names on this curve, see our roundup of vintage girl names coming back or the Hazel deep dive, which took the fast route August didn’t.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data.

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