Darren
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Obscure origin, said to be Irish; meaning given by Rule as ‘little great one’
A male name· listed as male by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 44 countries · latest register: SSA, 2025
/ˈdæɹən/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Darren is a male given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United Kingdom than in any other country, where it is the 99th most common given name.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 660(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 660
- IEIreland≈1 in 1K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Darren itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United Kingdom (inferred from the name graph)
- #872 (measured from records)
- 5 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 579 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 658 (inferred from the name graph)
≈110,000 people, est.
of 15M given names, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Obscure origin, said to be Irish; meaning given by Rule as ‘little great one’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Irish first names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Darren, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Darren counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | #99 | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 658 | 5 | Darren | 385 |
| US United States | #440 | 87,892 | 1 in 3.8K | 88K | Darren | 579 |
| AU Australia | #137 | ≈41,000 est. | ≈1 in 663 | 93 | Darren | 313 |
| CA Canada | #274 | ≈23,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.8K | 8 | Darren | 298 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈14,000 est. | ≈1 in 8.1K | — | Darren | 120 |
| IE Ireland | #114 | ≈5,200 est. | ≈1 in 1K | 23 | Darren | 157 |
| SG Singapore | #153 | ≈4,100 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | — | Darren | 148 |
| NZ New Zealand | #195 | ≈3,600 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | 14 | Darren | 150 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); NSW BDM — Popular baby names (1952–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present); DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Darren is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
20th-century coinage, of uncertain derivation. It may be a transferred use of a surname (itself of obscure origin). It seems to have been first borne by the American actor Darren McGavin (b. 1922). It came to public notice as the name of a character in the popular American television comedy series
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, A male given name originating as a coinage.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, English; great
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
[Ignoto]
as a nameIl grande libro dei nomi per bebè. Significato, origini, curiosità. Oltre 7000 nomi per bambine e bambini Significato,…
In Swedish, only used in få stora darren
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Darren Fletcherb. 1984GBScottish association football player (born 1984)
- Darren Bentb. 1984GBEnglish association football player
- Darren Crissb. 1987USAmerican actor and singer
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence
(measured from records)74 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 44 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Darren a male or female name?
- Darren is a male name. National registers that list it by sex list it as male: United States (Census Bureau, 2020), France (INSEE, 2024), Netherlands (Meertens NVB) and Finland (DVV), among others.
- What does the name Darren mean, and where does it come from?
- Obscure origin, said to be Irish; meaning given by Rule as ‘little great one’. Recorded by Irish first names.
- What are other forms of the name Darren?
- In the etymology graph, Darin, Darrin and Daren are forms of the same name in other languages.
- Which countries have the most people named Darren?
- Mondonomo estimates about 105 thousand people named Darren in the United Kingdom, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled darren. After it come United States, Australia, Canada and Philippines; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How do you pronounce Darren?
- In English /ˈdæɹən/ (Wiktionary).
- How common is the name Darren?
- In the United States, the national register counted 87,892 people named Darren in 2020, about 1 in 3.8 thousand residents.
- How common is Darren compared with other names?
- In the United Kingdom, Darren is the 99th most common given name of 404,737 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Darren?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/darrenThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Darren” — the 99th most common given name in United Kingdom. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.