Kenneth

given name · English · Latin script

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

Kenneth is a given name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 46th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Spanish, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: From Gaelic Coinneach, meaning 'handsome' or 'born of fire'.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom1 in 364◐
  • SGSingapore1 in 396
  • SESweden1 in 408

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

≈819K ●

across 10 countries

#215 ●

of 16M given names

3 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
584 ●

10M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 408 ◐

Sweden

Spellings & scripts●

KennethLatin · English●10M records
케네스Hangul · Korean●0 records
কেনেথBengali · Bangla●0 records

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

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 Gaelic Coinneach, meaning 'handsome' or 'born of fire'.

Sources 1

  • Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)

Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Kenneth is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#46754,8568.6M rec.1 in 441755KKenneth584
GB United Kingdom#60568,202515K rec.——Kenneth246
AU Australia#99211,379174K rec.—72Kenneth227
CA Canada#54192,903185K rec.—11Kenneth233
PH Philippines#159119,79990K rec.——Kenneth166
IT Italy#16357,38158K rec.—1Kenneth82
DE Germany#45438,65538K rec.——Kenneth161
NG Nigeria#20734,12843K rec.——Kenneth142
ZA South Africa#5529,22229K rec.——Kenneth119
SG Singapore#627,15527K rec.——Kenneth151
SE Sweden#23825,031△9K rec.1 in 40825KKenneth125
RU Russia#85623,16624K rec.——Kenneth57

Roughly 755K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 441). 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●

  • English10M83%
  • Spanish458K4%
  • 224K2%
  • Swahili107K1%
  • German92K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English10,195,83483%
Spanish457,9164%
223,6482%
Swahili106,8101%
German91,5961%

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◐

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

  • Spanish given name711K records spelled Kenneth14 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Philippines, France, Costa Rica

    Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese

    Also written Kenñeth, Kënneth, Kënnëth, Kénneth, Kếnneth

  • Polish given name51K records spelled Kenneth36 spellings in the group

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

    Languages: Polish, Russian, Czech

    Also written Кеннет, Кеннетх, Kennet, Kenet, Кенет

  • Finnish given name32K records spelled Kenneth6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Finland, Hungary, United States, Sweden

    Languages: Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian

    Also written Këññêth, Kënnëth

  • Greek given name23K records spelled Kenneth3 spellings in the group

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

    Also written Keneth, Κενεθ

82 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●

Kenneth 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, Scottish/Gaelic: handsome, fair; born of fire

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

  • from a Gaelic personal name (Coinneach) meaning ‘handsome’, now generally Anglicized as Kenneth, although this was originally the Anglicized form of Cionaodh (see McKinney). Etymologically, this surname is equivalent to Kenny (which can arise from either personal name) and McKenzie (which is from Coinneach).

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In English, A male given name from Scottish Gaelic, originally used in Scotland, popular in all English-speaking countries in the 20th century.

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

  • Apuesto, bello, atractivo

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

  • In Swedish, a male given name borrowed from English

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

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●

010K20K30K19001950200028K · 1957

Show as table
Kenneth in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1880–2025
Yearrecords
188032
188129
188222
188326
188428
188541
188638
188735
188845
188966
189072
189165
1892102
189383
1894105
1895127
1896175
1897164
1898191
1899214
1900279
1901246
1902275
1903330
1904414
1905474
1906534
1907589
1908692
1909746
1910880
19111,148
19122,538
19133,065
19144,178
19155,681
19166,012
19176,141
19186,809
19196,796
19207,840
19218,959
19229,258
19239,734
192410,355
192510,146
192610,342
192710,848
192811,167
192910,841
193011,705
193111,568
193211,742
193311,410
193411,800
193512,067
193612,486
193713,219
193814,399
193914,715
194015,132
194116,143
194218,210
194319,112
194418,093
194518,096
194622,042
194724,586
194823,550
194923,589
195023,813
195125,841
195225,909
195325,507
195426,186
195526,743
195627,432
195728,064
195826,684
195926,640
196027,701
196126,100
196225,241
196325,235
196424,850
196522,677
196620,834
196719,263
196818,077
196917,553
197016,800
197114,763
197212,334
197310,979
197410,143
19759,634
19769,127
19779,452
19789,021
19799,236
19809,608
19819,472
19829,354
19838,965
19848,790
19858,992
19868,453
19878,354
19888,567
19898,555
19908,262
19917,576
19926,732
19936,276
19945,679
19955,226
19964,973
19974,659
19984,586
19994,285
20004,152
20013,907
20023,665
20033,643
20043,425
20053,368
20063,243
20073,108
20082,967
20092,612
20102,428
20112,217
20122,224
20132,177
20142,153
20152,033
20161,921
20171,766
20181,671
20191,623
20201,483
20211,373
20221,312
20231,321
20241,190
20251,148

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 146 years between 1880–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

500100015002000Kenneth MacAlpin, b. 810Kenneth II of Scotland, b. 932Kenneth III of Scotland, b. 1000John Kenneth Galbraith, b. 1908Kenneth Arrow, b. 1921Kenneth Kaunda, b. 1924Kenneth Waltz, b. 1924Kenny Rogers, b. 1938Ken Jennings, b. 1974David Harbour, b. 1975

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 118 sources across 65 countries.

Official registers attesting Kenneth
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020755K#43
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—35K#112
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—25K#172
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—14K#52
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)202013K—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)20259.3K—
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—7.5K#90
EC EcuadorINEC — civil registry names20244.5K#299
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—3.5K#783
FI FinlandDVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register)—2.3K—
NL NetherlandsMeertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)—1.6K#1,563
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)20251.1K—

Reference works 5

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • 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 · 1,384 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Kenneth?
We estimate roughly 819 thousand people bear Kenneth (counting its spellings and scripts) across 10 countries in our records.
In which country does Kenneth have the most bearers?
We estimate about 755 thousand people bear Kenneth in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled kenneth.
How common is Kenneth compared with other names?
In the United States, Kenneth is the 46th most common given name of 3,122,706 given names recorded there.
Is Kenneth a male or female name?
Kenneth 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 Kenneth mean?
Recorded meaning: From Gaelic Coinneach, meaning 'handsome' or 'born of fire'.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kenneth

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, “Kenneth” — the 46th most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Kenneth parses inside a full name →