Little
Masculine · “small”
Little is given to both — 1,573 boys and 218 girls since 1880. See other names given to both
Little on a birth certificate is genuinely ambiguous, and the ambiguity is worth setting out rather than resolving. It may be a family surname used as a first name, which was standard practice. It may be the English word. It may be a clerk writing down what a family called a child who had not yet been formally named. The registers of the period contain all three and do not distinguish them.
How old is the name Little?
Little first appears in US birth records in 1883 — 142 years ago. The typical Little alive today was born around 1956, making them about 69 years old. About 900 people named Little are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Little most popular?
Little peaked in 1896, reaching #826 nationally. See the whole 1896 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From A nickname applied to one individual to Little
Our story of Little
Nickname surnames came first. Before English families were identified by their village or their trade, they were identified by something about a person: their size, their coloring, their temper, their habits. Little, Long, White, Black, Sharp, Wise, Bold and a hundred others are all of that class, and every one of them began as a description of a single individual and then descended to people it did not describe. That is the standard fate of a nickname surname and it is what makes them so odd to read: an enormous man can be called Little for eight hundred years because of one small ancestor. Whether this particular register entry is a surname doing that, or the plain word being used affectionately, or a placeholder that was never replaced, is not recoverable, and the honest thing is to say so.
Meaningscholars disagree
small
As a word the meaning is obvious. As a surname the meaning is a nickname applied to an ancestor, and nickname surnames are the oldest class of English family name, older than the occupational and locative ones. As a clerical shorthand it means nothing at all. Since the spelling cannot say which of the three produced any given entry, no single reading can be given for the name as a whole.
How the name formed
- A nickname applied to one individual
- Descending as an English surname
- Used as a first name in American registers
- Also appearing as a word and as a placeholder
Pronouncing Little
LIT-ul
Two syllables, stress on the first, said exactly as the ordinary word. There is nothing to teach anybody, which is characteristic of names taken directly from English vocabulary.
Nicknames for Little
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
- 1883
- Most boys named
- 196829 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #826reached in 1896
- Change vs 2004
- −37.5%5 in 2017, from 8
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.
Littles among us
people named Little 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
Little 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
- Nobody will mispronounce it and nobody will need it spelled.
- It works on the register for either child, which the record confirms.
- It has a genuine surname history behind it, which is more than most word names carry.
- The word means small, and it will be read as a description before it is read as a name.
- It is very firmly of the nineteenth century and has had no revival at all.
- There is no way to recover which of three quite different things a given family meant by it.
Nobody names a baby alone.
Put Little to the vote.
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What they receive
Someone added a name to your list
Little
Masculine
Frequently asked
- How many Littles are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 900 people named Little are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Little in 2025?
- Little is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 boy names.
- Will my child share the name Little with classmates?
- Little will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More L names
The most-given names starting with L, all years combined.
Larry#1084 · Lawrence#518 · Louis#249 · Logan#53 · Liam#1 · Lucas#10 · Luke#33 · Leonard#637
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Little? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Little and another name?
See them side by side — full stats, history and a gentle verdict.
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Weighing a whole shortlist? Add the rest in the builder, or settle it with a bracket.
Cast your vote
Which one would you pick?
Your gut first, the numbers after — the split shows once you pick.
US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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