Velvet
Feminine · “Latin villus”
Velvet is overwhelmingly a girls’ name — 3,096 girls against 5 boys since 1880.
Velvet is named after hair. Latin villus is a shaggy tuft, and the fabric takes its name from the raised pile that gives it the nap. National Velvet, filmed in 1944, put the word in front of an American audience as a girl's name, and the birth data follows: a slow rise from the 1940s to a peak in 1961.
How old is the name Velvet?
Velvet first appears in US birth records in 1920 — 105 years ago. The typical Velvet alive today was born around 1967, making them about 58 years old. About 2,800 people named Velvet are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Velvet most popular?
Velvet peaked in 1961, reaching #541 nationally. Today it ranks #8362, 7,821 places below that high. See the whole 1961 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From villus to Velvet
The story of Velvet
Velvet was expensive because of how it is made. The pile is produced by weaving extra warp threads over rods and then cutting them, or by weaving two cloths face to face and slicing them apart, and either method uses several times as much silk as a plain weave. Italian cities, Genoa, Venice and Lucca, dominated the trade from the fourteenth century, and sumptuary laws across Europe restricted who could wear it. The name entered American use largely through Enid Bagnold's 1935 novel National Velvet, about a butcher's daughter who wins a horse in a raffle and rides it in the Grand National, and the 1944 film adaptation. The girl in it is Velvet Brown. The peak in 1961 is late for a 1944 film and suggests the book and the film together kept the name in circulation rather than either producing a spike.
Meaning
Latin villus, a tuft of hair
From Old French veluotte and Medieval Latin villutus, shaggy, from villus, a tuft or shaggy hair. Velvet is a woven fabric with a short dense pile, made originally of silk and requiring a special loom, which is why it was a luxury for most of its history. As a given name it is a twentieth-century American word name, and it peaks in 1961.
How the name formed
- villus
- villutus
- Velvet
Related forms: Terciopelo
Pronouncing Velvet
VEL-vit
Two syllables, stress on the first. Identical to the common noun. There is no competing reading.
Nicknames for Velvet
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
- 1920
- Most girls named
- 1961332 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #541reached in 1961
- Change vs 2023
- −7.7%12 in 2025, from 13
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.
Velvet in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Terciopelo in Spanish — related form
Strongest US states over the last decade: California.
Velvets among us
people named Velvet are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 girl in 133,939 born in 2025 was named Velvet
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 Treva test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Velvet's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Treva climbed just as high around 1939, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Treva's path sketches the road Velvet is walking now.
Velvet 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
Velvet beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Velvet in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US girls given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- The word is familiar, concrete and pleasant.
- It has a documented literary and film origin.
- The spelling is unambiguous.
- It is a common noun and will be read as one.
- The name is closely dated to the middle of the twentieth century.
- It is rare enough now to invite comment.
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What they receive
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Velvet
Feminine · #8362 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Velvets are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 2,800 people named Velvet are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Velvet in 2025?
- Velvet ranks #8362 among US girl names in 2025, with 12 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Velvet?
- About 1 in every 133,939 US girls born in 2025 was named Velvet — 12 in all.
- Will my child share the name Velvet with classmates?
- Velvet will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Velvet
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Lona#8362 · Peggy#8362 · Leda#8362 · Margarette#8362 · Rella#8362 · Evalena#8362 · Vashti#8362 · Nona#8362
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Velvet? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Velvet and another name?
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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