Clara Baby Name History: A 145-Year Comeback
Clara was a top-10 name in the 1880s, nearly vanished by 1978, and just had its best year in decades: 3,601 babies in 2025. Here's where it goes next.
Start with where Clara is headed, because that’s the part most people want to know.
In 2025, 3,601 baby girls were named Clara, ranking it #63. That’s up from 3,072 babies (#78) in 2024: a gain of 529 in one year, Clara’s biggest jump since 1915. Our forecast doesn’t expect that pace to continue. It projects about 3,289 Claras in 2026 and roughly 3,529 by 2030.
So Clara isn’t about to explode. It looks like it’s settling in just outside the top 50, as a familiar name that won’t take over a classroom.
Here’s how it got there.
1880s: a top-10 name
Clara was a big name from the very start of the national record. In 1880, 1,226 baby girls were named Clara, ranking it #12. By 1885 it hit its best rank ever: #7, with 1,910 babies.
It stayed in the top 100 every single year from 1880 through 1938.
1918: the most Claras ever
The year with the most Claras wasn’t its best-ranked year. In 1918, 5,778 baby girls got the name, more than any year before or since. But it ranked only #43, because so many more babies were being born by then.
That’s a useful thing to know about name data in general: a name can get more common in raw numbers while slipping in rank.
The long quiet
After 1920, Clara slid steadily:
| Year | Babies | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| 1930 | 4,124 | #64 |
| 1940 | 2,316 | #111 |
| 1950 | 1,570 | #178 |
| 1960 | 915 | #309 |
| 1970 | 358 | #529 |
It bottomed out in 1978, with just 287 babies and a rank of #594. For a name that had been top 10, that’s about as close to disappearing as a classic gets.
The comeback
Clara started climbing in the 1990s, and by the 2000s it was moving fast:
| Year | Babies | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 467 | #515 |
| 2000 | 879 | #353 |
| 2010 | 1,842 | #167 |
| 2015 | 3,070 | #98 |
| 2020 | 2,696 | #103 |
| 2025 | 3,601 | #63 |
In 2015 it returned to the top 100 for the first time since 1938. That’s a 77-year gap.
It wobbled around #100 for most of the next decade, then broke out in 2024 and 2025.
This is the classic “100-year rule” in action. A name rests until the people who had it are great-grandparents, and then it sounds fresh again. Clara’s peak was the 1910s. Its comeback took off almost exactly a century later.
Want to see Clara's full curve? Every year since 1880, its top states and the names that sound like it are in our free lookup tool.
Where Clara is popular now
In 2025, Clara was most common in Texas (303 babies), California (253), New York (188), Ohio (176), and Florida and Pennsylvania (150 each).
If you love Clara
Clara sits in a cluster of vintage names that came back together. The names that sound most like it are Vivian, Alice, Ruby, Vera, Eva, Lillian, Elsie and Josephine.
At #63, Clara is common enough that everyone can spell it and rare enough that your daughter probably won’t share it with anyone in her class. And if the forecast is right, it’ll stay that way for a while.
Every count on this page is a number of real American babies, taken from the official national birth record that runs back to 1880.
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Get my 10 names →Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.