Dylan

given name · English · Latin script

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

Dylan is a given name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Ireland it is the 54th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Spanish, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: From the Welsh male personal name Dylan, of uncertain origin.

rarermore common
  • ECEcuador1 in 365◐
  • IEIreland1 in 418
  • AUAustralia1 in 844

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

≈470K ●

across 12 countries

3 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
528 ●

786K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 365 ◐

Ecuador

Spellings & scripts●

DylanLatin · English●1.1M records
דילןHebrew · Hebrew●1.9K records
ডিলানBengali · Bangla●0 records

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled דילן in FR France, IL Israel, AR Argentina.

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●

From the Welsh male personal name Dylan, of uncertain origin.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Dylan is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#540331,355640K rec.1 in 1K331KDylan528
AU Australia#159137,36164K rec.—1Dylan258
FR France—68,735△81 rec.1 in 98769Kדילן11
GB United Kingdom#43259,42923K rec.—788Dylan234
CA Canada#26549,62410K rec.—35Dylan214
EC Ecuador#23046,356△188 rec.1 in 36546KDylan38
IE Ireland#5422,3083K rec.—223Dylan115
PE Peru—14,945614 rec.—14KDylan38
ES Spain—14,236△1.3K rec.1 in 3.5K14KDylan92
BE Belgium#2886,1775.6K rec.—149Dylan123
ZA South Africa#6485,8605K rec.——Dylan121
CR Costa Rica—2,982△1 rec.1 in 1.7K3K—1

Roughly 331K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 1K). 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●

  • English1.1M46%
  • Spanish527K23%
  • French481K21%
  • Portuguese30K1%
  • Aymara27K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English1,056,15546%
Spanish526,51523%
French480,79221%
Portuguese29,8591%
Aymara27,2491%

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◐

Dylan is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish given name1.1M records spelled Dylan79 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Argentina, United States, Spain

    Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese

    Also written Dylán, Dylàn, D'Ylan, Dylän, Dylãn

  • Polish given name12K records spelled Dylan38 spellings in the group

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

    Languages: Polish, Russian, Croatian

    Also written Дилан, Dilan, Ділан, Дылан, Dylàn

  • a separate given name8.9K records spelled Dylan2 spellings in the group

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

    Also written Dýlan

  • Lao given name4.9K records spelled Dylan29 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Laos, United States, Thailand, United Kingdom

    Languages: Lao, Thai

    Also written Delen, ดีแลน, Deelen, ดีเลน, ดิเลน

  • Turkish given name3.3K records spelled Dylan4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Türkiye

    Languages: Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani

    Also written Dylãñ

  • Finnish given name3.2K records spelled Dylan4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Finland, United States, United Kingdom, Hungary

    Languages: Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian

    Also written Dÿlãn

68 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●

Dylan 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 French, Welsh name, from dy ‘great’ + llanw ‘tide/sea’ or related to ‘son of the sea’

    as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)

  • In Welsh, Welsh name probably meaning ‘great tide/sea’; also interpreted as ‘sea god’.

    as a nameIrish first names

  • Welsh: of uncertain origin, probably connected with a Celtic word meaning ‘sea’. In the Mabinogi it is the name of the miraculously born son of Arianrhod, who became a minor divinity of the sea.

    as a nameA concise dictionary of first names

  • In French, a male given name from Welsh, popular in the 1990s

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Swedish, Dylan är ett namn av keltiskt ursprung, först använt i Wales. Det hör samman med ett keltiskt ord som betyder ’hav’. En känd namnbärare är den walesiske poeten Dylan Thomas (1914–53) som i sin tur inspirerade den amerikanske sångpoeten och Nobelpristagaren Bob Dylan (f. 1941) att byta sitt efternamn Zimmerman till Dylan. Namnet Dylan kan i vissa fall också vara en alternativ stavning av → Dilan.

    as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon

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●

05K10K15K20K196019802000202016K · 2001

Show as table
Dylan in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1953–2025
Yearrecords
19535
19547
195512
195610
195711
195822
195930
196039
196133
196219
196334
196438
196547
196662
196763
1968121
1969228
1970314
1971257
1972302
1973277
1974384
1975454
1976399
1977530
1978480
1979639
1980822
1981729
1982700
1983777
1984971
19851,331
19861,833
19871,997
19882,158
19892,853
19904,414
19919,763
199215,064
199312,686
199412,530
199512,091
199612,037
199712,968
199814,540
199915,981
200015,405
200116,497
200214,821
200315,703
200414,852
200513,782
200613,171
200712,811
200811,710
200911,373
201010,520
20119,792
201210,001
201310,127
201410,416
201510,298
20169,720
20179,315
20188,610
20197,555
20206,857
20216,767
20226,745
20237,074
20247,487
20256,208

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 73 years between 1953–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1900195020002050Dylan Thomas, b. 1914Dylan Baker, b. 1959Dylan McDermott, b. 1961Dylan Neal, b. 1969Dylan Penn, b. 1991Dylan O'Brien, b. 1991Dylan Sprouse, b. 1992Dylan Arnold, b. 1994Dylan Minnette, b. 1996Jack Dylan Grazer, b. 2003

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 112 sources across 61 countries.

Official registers attesting Dylan
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020331K#145
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024)202469K#321
EC EcuadorINEC — civil registry names202446K#43
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—14K#443
PE PeruRENIEC — DNI population names202214K#3
PE PeruRENIEC — Nombres y apellidos más frecuentes (frequency portal)202214K#3
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202013K#145
ES SpainINE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—11K#235
NL NetherlandsMeertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)—10K#388
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)20256.2K—
GT GuatemalaRENAP — annual births20253.4K#3
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—3K#263

Reference works 4

  • Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (Tom II: C-D)
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name 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 · 1,212 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Dylan?
We estimate roughly 470 thousand people bear Dylan (counting its spellings and scripts) across 12 countries in our records.
In which country does Dylan have the most bearers?
We estimate about 331 thousand people bear Dylan in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled dylan.
Where is Dylan most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Dylan is densest in Ecuador — about 1 in 365 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is Dylan compared with other names?
In the United States, Dylan is the 540th most common given name of 3,122,706 given names recorded there.
Is Dylan a male or female name?
Dylan 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 Dylan mean?
Recorded meaning: From the Welsh male personal name Dylan, of uncertain origin.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/dylan

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, “Dylan” — the 540th most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Dylan parses inside a full name →