Bethany
Feminine · Aramaic roots
Bethany is overwhelmingly a girls’ name — 100,902 girls against 184 boys since 1880.
Bethany is a place before it is a person: a village on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, a short walk from Jerusalem, named in the Gospels as the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. English speakers began lifting it off the map and onto children a few centuries later, and it has kept the shape of the place — three unhurried syllables, all soft consonants, landing on that light -y. It shortens to Beth almost by reflex.
How old is the name Bethany?
Bethany first appears in US birth records in 1915 — 110 years ago. The typical Bethany alive today was born around 1991, making them about 34 years old. About 98,000 people named Bethany are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Bethany most popular?
Bethany peaked in 1987, reaching #87 nationally. Today it ranks #751, 664 places below that high. See the whole 1987 chart.
Bethany appears on these lists:
Where it comes from
From Beit Anya (Aramaic) to Bethany
The story of Bethany
The name belongs first to a village on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, named repeatedly in the Gospels as the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus and the place Jesus stayed during his last week. From Aramaic it passed into Greek as Bēthania, then Latin, and so into every European Bible. English-speaking Protestants had a long habit of naming chapels after biblical places, and Bethany and its Welsh form Bethania sit on chapel doorways and village signs across Wales to this day. Its use as a girl's given name grew out of that scriptural and chapel familiarity, and took hold properly in the twentieth century, with a long slow rise and a broad, unhurried decline since.
Meaningscholars disagree
From the Aramaic place name Beit Anya, near Jerusalem — most often read as 'house of figs' or 'house of affliction'
Two readings of the Aramaic compete: beit te'enah, 'house of figs' or 'house of unripe figs', and beit anya, 'house of affliction' or 'house of the poor'. A third traces it to a personal name, Ananiah, giving 'house of Ananiah'. The village itself is not in doubt; only the older layer beneath its name is.
How the name formed
- Beit AnyaAramaic
- BēthaniaGreek
- BethaniaLatin
- Bethany
Related forms: Betania · Betânia · Betania · Bethania · Béthanie · Vithania
Pronouncing Bethany
BETH-uh-nee
Stress on the first syllable. The th is soft, as in 'bath'. Rarely misread, though the middle syllable can flatten to almost nothing in fast speech: BETH-nee.
Nicknames for Bethany
High
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1915
- Most girls named
- 19873,294 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #87reached in 1987
- Change vs 2023
- −7.2%362 in 2025, from 390
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Bethany in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Betania in Spanish — same name
- Betânia in Portuguese — same name
- Betania in Italian — same name
- Bethania in Welsh — related form
- Béthanie in French — same name
- Vithania in Greek — transliteration
Strongest US states over the last decade: California, Texas, Pennsylvania.
Bethanys among us
people named Bethany are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 girl in 4,440 born in 2025 was named Bethany
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
What happens to a name after it peaks
The Maureen test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Bethany's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Maureen climbed just as high around 1948, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Maureen's path sketches the road Bethany is walking now.
Bethany is coming down from a big peak (#87 in 1987). This is the stretch of the cycle where a name starts to sound like the decade it ruled.
A scored estimate from 146 years of naming cycles — not a prophecy. Great names outlive statistics. How this is scored
Where Bethany is headed
Bethany should hold steady through 2030 — the curve is flat, and flat curves are the most predictable kind.
High confidence — fitted on official counts through 2025.
A damped-trend projection of the official birth data — a sketch of momentum, not a promise. Every name's forecast, ranked.
Bethany beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Bethany in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US girls given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- One dominant spelling that most English speakers can write correctly on first hearing, and read correctly on first sight.
- Beth is a ready-made short form with centuries of use behind it, so the name offers a formal and an informal register from day one.
- Recognizable well beyond English through Betania, Betânia and Béthanie, which keep the same sound and the same biblical reference.
- A clear, uncontroversial origin story a child can look up on a map, which is more than most names offer.
- Beth arrives at most people through Elizabeth, so a Bethany who goes by it will spend some of her life correcting the assumption about her full name.
- The name is strongly represented among adults in their thirties and forties, which gives it a distinctly generational sound right now — it reads less as vintage than as recent-past, the stage most names pass through before they come back.
- Bethanie, Bethani and Bethanee all exist, so the standard spelling occasionally gets queried even though it is the settled one.
- It rhymes closely enough with Brittany and Tiffany that the three get muddled in a noisy room.
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What they receive
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Bethany
Feminine · Aramaic roots · #751 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Bethanys are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 98,000 people named Bethany are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Bethany in 2025?
- Bethany ranks #751 among US girl names in 2025, with 362 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Bethany?
- About 1 in every 4,440 US girls born in 2025 was named Bethany — 362 in all.
- Will my child share the name Bethany with classmates?
- Bethany will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Bethany
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Milan#751 · Adele#751 · Karina#749 · Davina#749 · Amaris#754 · Rynlee#755 · Mikayla#746 · Araceli#746
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Bethany? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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