Creighton
Masculine · “border settlement”
Creighton is overwhelmingly a boys’ name — 3,764 boys against 16 girls since 1880.
Creighton is a Scottish place name and a small piece of linguistic archaeology: it joins a Gaelic word for a border to the English word for a settlement, which tells you exactly where it sits.
How old is the name Creighton?
Creighton first appears in US birth records in 1906 — 119 years ago. The typical Creighton alive today was born around 1987, making them about 38 years old. About 3,000 people named Creighton are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Creighton most popular?
Creighton peaked in 1944, reaching #1152 nationally. Today it ranks #3757, 2,605 places below that high. See the whole 1944 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From crioch tun to Creighton
The story of Creighton
Crichton in Midlothian gave the name to a family who became substantial in Scottish politics and founded a university in Edinburgh. The compound is unusual: a Gaelic first element and an English second in one place name, recording the boundary between two speech communities. The surname reached America with Scottish emigration; the Creighton spelling belongs to an Omaha university and an Irish-American family.
Meaning
border settlement
From Gaelic crioch, a boundary or border, and Old English tun, a farmstead; the compound of a Gaelic and an English element in one name marks the place as sitting on the line between two languages, which it does.
How the name formed
- crioch tun
- Crichton
- Creighton
Related forms: Crichton · Críochtún
Pronouncing Creighton
KRAY-tuhn
Two syllables, first stressed. The Scottish Crichton is said CRY-tuhn, which is a real difference.
Nicknames for Creighton
Moderate
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
- 1906
- Most boys named
- 201162 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #1152reached in 1944
- Change vs 2023
- −29.3%29 in 2025, from 41
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.
Creighton in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Crichton in Scots — spelling variant
- Críochtún in Irish — related form
Strongest US states over the last decade: Nebraska, Missouri, Texas.
Creightons among us
people named Creighton are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 boy in 58,899 born in 2025 was named Creighton
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Spellings of Creighton
- #3757
- Creighton on the 2025 chart
- #889
- counting every spelling
The SSA counts spellings, not names. Creighton went to 29 boys in 2025, but Kreighton is the same name said out loud. Together the 2 spellings went to 39, which makes it the 889th most-given boys’ name of the year — 2,868 places above the chart.
- Creighton29
- Kreighton10
About 1 boy in 43,797 born in 2025 was given one of these spellings — against 1 in 58,899 for Creighton itself.
Spellings are grouped by a fixed rule that folds interchangeable English spellings of one sound (ck/k, ph/f, x/ks, a non-initial y for i) and keeps vowels apart, so Sean and Shawn stay separate names. It errs towards splitting: a family here is never larger than the truth. SSA national data, 2025. Method
Is it right for you
What happens to a name after it peaks
The Tadashi test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Creighton's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Tadashi climbed just as high around 1917, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Tadashi's path sketches the road Creighton is walking now.
Creighton sits in the calm middle of the cycle — neither chasing a wave nor sliding off one. Middle-of-the-cycle names age slowly and predictably.
A scored estimate from 146 years of naming cycles — not a prophecy. Great names outlive statistics. How this is scored
Where Creighton is headed
Creighton should hold steady through 2030 — the curve is flat, and flat curves are the most predictable kind.
Medium 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.
Creighton beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Creighton in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US boys given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- A settled meaning with a genuinely interesting linguistic border behind it.
- Genuine mid-century American use as a given name.
- It fits the -ton group without being one of the crowded ones.
- Creighton and Crichton are said differently, which causes real confusion.
- Nine letters and an eigh spelling is a great deal for early handwriting.
- It reads as a surname to people meeting it in front of another one.
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What they receive
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Creighton
Masculine · #3757 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Creightons are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 3,000 people named Creighton are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How do you spell Creighton?
- Creighton is the most-used spelling in US records — 29 of the 39 babies given the name in 2025. The others recorded are Kreighton.
- How popular is the name Creighton in 2025?
- Creighton ranks #3757 among US boy names in 2025, with 29 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Creighton?
- About 1 in every 58,899 US boys born in 2025 was named Creighton — 29 in all.
- Will my child share the name Creighton with classmates?
- Creighton will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Creighton
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Stanton#3757 · Reymundo#3757 · Greer#3757 · Zaven#3757 · Kelson#3757 · Javin#3757 · Faizan#3757 · Wilfred#3757
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Creighton? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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