Female
Feminine · “Little woman”
Female is overwhelmingly a girls’ name — 1,292 girls against 5 boys since 1880.
The word itself has a hidden history that almost nobody knows: female is not built on male, and never was. The two words come from different Latin roots and arrived in English by different routes, and the spelling of one was changed to match the other because people assumed they must be a pair.
How old is the name Female?
Female first appears in US birth records in 1981 — 44 years ago. The typical Female alive today was born around 1993, making them about 32 years old. About 1,300 people named Female are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Female most popular?
Female peaked in 1990, reaching #1110 nationally. See the whole 1990 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From femella to Female
The story of Female
English did the same thing twice. Woman is not built on man either: the Old English word for a human being of either sex was man, and a woman was a wifman, with wif meaning a woman specifically, so the modern word is a compound of two words for a person rather than a modification of one. Over time man narrowed to mean an adult male, and the pair looks like a base and a derivative when it is nothing of the kind. Female went through the parallel process from the other direction, arriving whole from French and then being reshaped by the eye. Both words are examples of a language tidying its own vocabulary into patterns that were never there.
Meaning
Little woman
Latin femina is a woman, and femella is its diminutive, meaning a young woman or a small one. That gave Old French femelle and Middle English femelle. Male came from a different word entirely, Latin masculus by way of French masle. The two had nothing in common until English respelled the first to look like the second, which happened early enough that the join is now invisible.
How the name formed
- femella
- femelle
- female
Pronouncing Female
FEE-mayl
Two syllables with the stress at the front and a full second vowel, exactly as the ordinary word. The e in the first syllable is long because of the way English inherited the French spelling, not because anything was added to lengthen it.
Nicknames for Female
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
- 1981
- Most girls named
- 1990157 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #1110reached in 1990
- Change vs 2014
- −81.9%13 in 2015, from 72
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.
Females among us
people named Female 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
Female 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
- There is nothing to explain about how it is said or spelled; everybody already knows both.
- The word has a genuinely surprising history, which is more than most names can offer.
- It is unmistakable in writing, and no one will ever ask for it to be repeated.
- It is an ordinary English word for a category of person, and it will be read as a form field rather than as a name.
- The word does duty for animals as well as people, which is a comparison a child will hear made.
- Nothing distinguishes it from the box ticked on the certificate beside it.
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Female
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Females are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 1,300 people named Female are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Female in 2025?
- Female is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Female with classmates?
- Female will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More F names
The most-given names starting with F, all years combined.
Frances#318 · Florence#391 · Faith#254 · Felicia#5554 · Fannie#3342 · Faye#514 · Flora#607 · Freda#6546
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Female? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Female and another name?
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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