Ryan
given name · Latin script
Meaning: (i) Descendant of Rian or Riaghan; (ii) reduced form of Mulryan, descendant of the follower of (St) Riaghan
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Ryan is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 81st most common given name.
- USUnited States1 in 380(measured from records)
- PHPhilippines≈1 in 481
- AUAustralia≈1 in 528
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- #188 (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 671 (measured from records)
- 1 in 380 (inferred from the name graph)
874,269 people, 2020
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
(i) Descendant of Rian or Riaghan; (ii) reduced form of Mulryan, descendant of the follower of (St) Riaghan.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Ryan 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #81 | 874,269 | 1 in 380 | 854K | Ryan | 671 |
| ID Indonesia | #117 | ≈380,000 est. | ≈1 in 698 | — | Ryan | 227 |
| PH Philippines | #36 | ≈230,000 est. | ≈1 in 481 | — | Ryan | 200 |
| GB United Kingdom | #100 | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 591 | 4 | Ryan | 383 |
| BR Brazil | — | 99,739 | 1 in 2.1K | 100K | — | 7 |
| AU Australia | #92 | ≈48,000 est. | ≈1 in 528 | 1 | Ryan | 333 |
| GY Guyana | — | 1,631 | 1 in 460 | 1.6K | — | 26 |
874,269 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
Ryan 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.
In English, O Maoilriain from an old personal name meaning 'administrator' or 'water'; chiefs in Owney, Co. Tipperary and Limerick
as a nameIrish family names
In English, ‘Little king’; Irish surname used as a Christian name in North America and Ireland.
as a nameIrish first names
simplified form of Mulryan. The surname from this source is particularly common in Tipperary. 2. Anglicized form of Gael. O Riain ‘descendant of Rian or Riaghan’, a personal name of uncertain origin. There has been consid¬ erable confusion with Regan. Rutberg see Rothenberg Vars.; O’Ryan, Rian.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
,2 From the Irish surname, Gaelic O Riain ‘descendant of Rian’. The latter is an ancient Gaelic personal name of uncertain origin, probably a derivative of ri ‘king’. Ryan is associated with the film actor Ryan O’Neal (b. 1941). It is also now well established in North America as a girl’s name.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In Swedish, Ryan är ursprungligen ett iriskt (gäliskt) släktnamn: O’Riain ’ättling till Riain’, som tagits i bruk som förnamn. Tolkningen av Riain är oviss, möjligen är namnet bildat till gäliskans ri ’kung’. En känd namnbärare är den amerikanske skådespelaren Ryan O’Neal (1941–2023). I USA bärs namnet även av kvinnor.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
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)
- Ryan Whiteb. 1971USAmerican AIDS spokesperson and "poster boy" (1971–1990)
- Ryan Giggsb. 1973GBWelsh association football player and coach
- Sean Paul Henriquesb. 1973JMnot in their usual nameJamaican dancehall singer and rapper (born 1973)
- Ryan Adamsb. 1974USAmerican musician (born 1974)
- Ryan Reynoldsb. 1976CACanadian-American actor and entrepreneur (born 1976)
- Ryan Goslingb. 1980CACanadian actor (born 1980)
- Ryan Lochteb. 1984USAmerican swimmer
- Ryan Babelb. 1986NLDutch association football player (born 1986)
- Josh Hutchersonb. 1992USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor
- Ryan Newmanb. 1998USAmerican actress, singer and model
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 128 sources across 63 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 854K | #34 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 100K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 99K | #322 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 34K | #1,006 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 21K | #34 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 13K | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 3.5K | — |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 1.6K | #16 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 950 | #322 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 393 | — |
| AU Australia | Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM) | 2023 | 345 | — |
Reference works 6
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Ryan a male or female name?
- Ryan is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- What does the name Ryan mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) Descendant of Rian or Riaghan; (ii) reduced form of Mulryan, descendant of the follower of (St) Riaghan. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How common is the name Ryan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 874,269 people named Ryan in 2020, about 1 in 380 residents.
- How common is Ryan compared with other names?
- In the United States, Ryan is the 81st most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
- In which country does Ryan have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 874 thousand people named Ryan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled ryan.
- Where is Ryan most common?
- Ryan is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 380 people carrying it.
- What are other forms of the name Ryan?
- In the etymology graph, Rian is a form of the same name in other languages.
What do you want to know about Ryan?
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/ryanThe 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, “Ryan” — the 81st most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.