Brian

given name · English · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Brian is a given name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 22nd most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Spanish, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Celtic name meaning 'hill'; borne by Brian Boru, famed high king of Ireland.

rarermore common
  • IEIreland1 in 155◐
  • GBUnited Kingdom1 in 219
  • CACanada1 in 240

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈1.2M ●

across 9 countries

#98 ●

of 16M given names

5 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
609 ●

17M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 258 ◐

Ecuador

Spellings & scripts●

BrianLatin · English●12M records
בריאןHebrew · Hebrew●4K records
브라이언Hangul · Korean●4 records
ԲրայանArmenian · Armenian●0 records
ব্রায়ানBengali · Bangla●0 records

3 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Brayan in BR Brazil, CO Colombia, MX Mexico and 4 more, Bryan in PH Philippines, EC Ecuador, MY Malaysia and בריאן in FR France.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin●

Celtic name meaning 'hill'; borne by Brian Boru, famed high king of Ireland.

Sources 1

  • Irish first names

Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Brian is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#221,009,89114M rec.1 in 3291MBrian609
GB United Kingdom#31952,967858K rec.—4Brian291
AR Argentina#258525,742260K rec.—420Brian140
AU Australia#53376,744324K rec.—75Brian300
CA Canada#22345,302328K rec.—11Brian286
PH Philippines#62218,283171K rec.——Bryan167
CO Colombia#76143,22067K rec.—7Brayan134
MX Mexico#333113,73883K rec.——Brayan184
PE Peru#34696,53575K rec.——Brayan75
BR Brazil#59371,67941K rec.1 in 3K72KBrayan151
IT Italy#13966,01069K rec.—508Brian130
EC Ecuador#10065,634△2.7K rec.1 in 25866KBryan79

Roughly 1M people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 329). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • English12M79%
  • Spanish1.1M7%
  • Portuguese299K2%
  • Swahili271K2%
  • 230K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English12,175,52679%
Spanish1,068,1907%
Portuguese298,9662%
Swahili271,2242%
230,4221%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Brian is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate given name251K records spelled Brian3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India

    Also written Brían, Brián

  • Polish given name67K records spelled Brian101 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Poland, Czechia, United Kingdom

    Languages: Polish, Russian, Czech

    Also written Bryan, Brayan, Брайан, Brajan, Брайн

  • Indonesian given name49K records spelled Brian3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay

    Also written 'Brian

  • Greek given name24K records spelled Brian8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Greece, United States, United Kingdom, Canada

    Also written Bryan, Braian, Briant, Mpraian, Μπραιαν

93 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Brian is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, from a Breton name introduced into England by the Normans; in the north also from Olr Brian via Norsemen from Ireland; first attested Radulfus filius Brien 1086

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In Swedish, Brian är ett ursprungligen iriskt eller bretonskt namn, kanske från keltiskans *brigonos ’hög, ädel’. Det kom till Sverige med återvändande USA-emigranter runt 1900, men blev mer populärt först efter andra världskriget.

    as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon

  • In English, Irish; high, noble

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • Fuerte

    as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado

  • Alto

    as a nameIl grande libro dei nomi per bebè. Significato, origini, curiosità. Oltre 7000 nomi per bambine e bambini Significato,…

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Over time●

010K20K30K40K19201940196019802000202036K · 1972

Show as table
Brian in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1909–2025
Yearrecords
19095
19117
19126
191314
191411
191521
191617
191714
191812
191914
192031
192134
192231
192335
192438
192559
192647
192775
1928104
1929112
193090
193193
1932119
1933150
1934187
1935254
1936344
1937519
1938609
1939808
19401,007
19411,123
19421,523
19431,950
19441,954
19451,989
19462,585
19473,450
19483,358
19493,854
19504,441
19515,101
19525,741
19536,665
19548,078
195510,109
195614,666
195717,519
195819,279
195920,737
196022,000
196122,566
196223,221
196324,133
196424,167
196524,552
196627,253
196728,646
196829,922
196931,669
197031,917
197132,624
197236,306
197335,686
197434,449
197530,578
197630,517
197732,492
197829,432
197928,659
198028,715
198126,583
198225,829
198326,050
198424,720
198523,069
198621,027
198720,362
198819,532
198918,106
199016,935
199114,915
199214,107
199312,544
199411,648
199510,991
199610,476
19979,739
19989,146
19998,808
20008,958
20018,303
20028,082
20037,672
20047,333
20056,920
20066,511
20076,075
20085,263
20094,658
20103,766
20113,250
20122,820
20132,645
20142,536
20152,218
20161,984
20171,778
20181,631
20191,479
20201,261
20211,188
20221,180
20231,049
20241,116
2025979

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 116 years between 1909–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

19201940196019802000Brian Epstein, b. 1934Brian David Josephson, b. 1940Brian De Palma, b. 1940Brian George, b. 1952Warrior, b. 1959Brian Schmidt, b. 1967Marilyn Manson, b. 1969Brian Welch, b. 1970Brian Tyler, b. 1972Jordan Henderson, b. 1990

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence●

Attested in 125 sources across 67 countries.

Official registers attesting Brian
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20201M#25
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)202226K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—26K#897
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—18K#38
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—11K#1,977
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024)20248.1K#1,299
NL NetherlandsMeertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)—6.9K#537
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)20206.6K—
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—5.2K#852
ES SpainINE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—5.1K#394
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020104.2K#7,854
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020004.2K#7,327

Reference works 6

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 1,642 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Brian?
We estimate roughly 1.2 million people bear Brian (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Brian have the most bearers?
We estimate about 1.0 million people bear Brian in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled brian.
How common is Brian compared with other names?
In the United States, Brian is the 22nd most common given name of 3,122,706 given names recorded there.
Is Brian a male or female name?
Brian is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What does the name Brian mean?
Recorded meaning: Celtic name meaning 'hill'; borne by Brian Boru, famed high king of Ireland.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/brian

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Brian” — the 22nd most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Brian parses inside a full name →