Felton
Masculine · “settlement in open land”
Felton is overwhelmingly a boys’ name — 6,588 boys against 5 girls since 1880.
Felton is a settlement in open country. Old English feld did not mean a fenced field — it meant unwooded land, the cleared ground beyond the trees — and tun was an enclosure or a farmstead. Put together they name a place in the open, and half the English map is built from that second element.
How old is the name Felton?
Felton first appears in US birth records in 1888 — 137 years ago. The typical Felton alive today was born around 1948, making them about 77 years old. About 3,200 people named Felton are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Felton most popular?
Felton peaked in 1904, reaching #515 nationally. See the whole 1904 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From feld tun to Felton
The story of Felton
The -ton ending closes an extraordinary number of English place names because tun was the ordinary word for a settled place for several centuries, and every one of those places produced a surname for the families who came from it. American naming took a great many of them for sons in the nineteenth century — Felton, Milton, Clayton, Dalton, Carlton — and they arrived and faded together, which is why they now sound like a set. Felton is also a southern American surname of long standing, which gave it a second route into use.
Meaning
settlement in open land
Old English feld is open country, land without trees, and it is the ancestor of the modern field, which has narrowed considerably in meaning. Tun began as an enclosure and became a farmstead, a village and finally a town — the English word town is the same word grown up. So Felton describes a settlement in cleared land, which was worth saying when most of the country was not. The derivation is transparent and not disputed.
How the name formed
- feld tun
- Felton
Pronouncing Felton
FEL-tun
FEL-tun, two syllables, stress at the front, the second vowel reduced. Both halves are ordinary English words and there is no ambiguity anywhere in the spelling.
Nicknames for Felton
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
- 1888
- Most boys named
- 1948128 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #515reached in 1904
- Change vs 2021
- +40.0%7 in 2024, from 5
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.
Feltons among us
people named Felton are estimated to be alive in the US today
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
Questions parents actually ask
Fashion outlook
Felton sits outside the current charts, and that is its own kind of answer: naming cycles can only date the names they carried up. A name this rare has no decade stamped on it — it cannot go out of fashion, because it was never in.
Based on 146 years of naming cycles. How we read them
The trade-off
- Both elements are plain Old English, so the name explains itself once looked at.
- It has real English places and a real American surname behind it.
- It goes to girls as well as boys, as place-derived names generally do.
- The name is strongly associated with the oldest generations and reads as belonging to them.
- Fulton, Felton and Dalton are close enough to be confused, and all carry the same period.
- It reads as a surname on a list, which happens to every name that makes this journey.
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What they receive
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Felton
Masculine
Frequently asked
- How many Feltons are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 3,200 people named Felton are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Felton in 2025?
- Felton is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 boy names.
- Will my child share the name Felton with classmates?
- Felton will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More F names
The most-given names starting with F, all years combined.
Frank#513 · Fred#1932 · Francis#420 · Frederick#435 · Floyd#2230 · Francisco#322 · Franklin#359 · Fernando#387
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Felton? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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