Dylan
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in English: From the Welsh male personal name Dylan, of uncertain origin
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/dɪlən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Dylan is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 967(measured from records)
- FRFrance≈1 in 1K
- BEBelgium≈1 in 1.3K
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)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 587 (measured from records)
- 1 in 365 (inferred from the name graph)
343,919 people, 2020
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Ecuador
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Dilan in EC Ecuador and דילן in AR Argentina.
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)
From the Welsh male personal name Dylan, of uncertain origin.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
How Dylan is read(measured from records)
Dylan is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English60%
From the Welsh male personal name Dylan, of uncertain origin.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
- French19%
Welsh name, from dy ‘great’ + llanw ‘tide/sea’ or related to ‘son of the sea’
as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
a male given name from Welsh, popular in the 1990s
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Spanish14%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Dylan in Spanish.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Dylan, 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)
Dylan 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 | #522 | 343,919 | 1 in 967 | 331K | Dylan | 587 |
| CN China | — | ≈70,000 est. | ≈1 in 20K | — | Dylan | 45 |
| FR France | — | ≈65,000 est. | ≈1 in 1K | 69K | Dylan | 14 |
| EC Ecuador | — | 46,356 | 1 in 365 | 46K | Dilan | 37 |
| AR Argentina | — | ≈25,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.9K | 1.1K | דילן | 3 |
| AU Australia | #248 | ≈20,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | 1 | Dylan | 271 |
| BE Belgium | #262 | ≈9,400 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | 149 | Dylan | 127 |
343,919 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; SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024); INEC — civil registry names; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–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)
Dylan is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Welsh, Welsh name probably meaning ‘great tide/sea’; also interpreted as ‘sea god’.
as a nameIrish first names
Welsh: of uncertain origin, probably connected with a Celtic word meaning ‘sea’. In the Mabinogi it is the name of the miraculously born son of Arianrhod, who became a minor divinity of the sea.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In Swedish, Dylan är ett namn av keltiskt ursprung, först använt i Wales. Det hör samman med ett keltiskt ord som betyder ’hav’. En känd namnbärare är den walesiske poeten Dylan Thomas (1914–53) som i sin tur inspirerade den amerikanske sångpoeten och Nobelpristagaren Bob Dylan (f. 1941) att byta sitt efternamn Zimmerman till Dylan. Namnet Dylan kan i vissa fall också vara en alternativ stavning av → Dilan.
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)
- Dylan Thomasb. 1914GBWelsh poet and writer (1914–1953)
- Dylan Bakerb. 1959USAmerican actor
- Dylan McDermottb. 1961USAmerican actor
- Dylan Nealb. 1969CACanadian/American actor (born 1969)
- Dylan Pennb. 1991USAmerican model and actress
- Dylan O'Brienb. 1991USAmerican actor (born 1991)
- Dylan Sprouseb. 1992USAmerican actor (born 1992)
- Dylan Arnoldb. 1994USAmerican actor
- Dylan Minnetteb. 1996USAmerican actor and musician (born 1996)
- Jack Dylan Grazerb. 2003USAmerican actor
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)
Attested in 113 sources across 61 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 331K | #145 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024) | 2024 | 69K | #321 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — civil registry names | 2024 | 46K | #43 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 13K | #145 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 6.2K | — |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | 2024 | 1.5K | — |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present) | 2024 | 1.1K | #129 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 338 | — |
| AR Argentina | datos.gob.ar — nombres.datos.gob.ar per-name lookup (1922–2015) | 2015 | 280 | — |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — births 1922–2015 (Kaggle mirror) | 2015 | 280 | — |
Reference works 4
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Dylan a male or female name?
- Dylan 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 Dylan mean, and where does it come from?
- From the Welsh male personal name Dylan, of uncertain origin. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How common is the name Dylan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 343,919 people named Dylan in 2020, about 1 in 967 residents.
- How common is Dylan compared with other names?
- In the United States, Dylan is the 522nd most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
- In which country does Dylan have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 344 thousand people named Dylan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dylan.
- Where is Dylan most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Dylan is densest in Ecuador — about 1 in 365 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- What are other forms of the name Dylan?
- In the etymology graph, Dillan is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Dylan?
- A machine transcription gives /dɪlən/ (IPA) for English.
What do you want to know about Dylan?
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/dylanThe 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, “Dylan” — the 522nd most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.