Bess
#14,942 in the US in 2025
Bess in the United States
Between 2012 and 2025 the name has been steady.
SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Bess in New Zealand
Bess never reached 10 births in a single year in New Zealand, so it does not appear in the DIA file. That is a reporting floor, not a zero — the name may still have been registered here, just never ten times in one year.
SOURCE·NZ Department of Internal Affairs, births by first name·CC BY 4.0. DIA lists a name only if it was given to at least 10 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Decade by decade in the US
| Year | Rank | Births |
|---|---|---|
| 1880 | #227 | 46 |
| 1890 | #190 | 154 |
| 1900 | #280 | 134 |
| 1910 | #421 | 88 |
| 1920 | #797 | 82 |
| 1930 | #1,251 | 36 |
| 1940 | #1,404 | 29 |
| 1950 | #2,652 | 15 |
| 1960 | #2,307 | 26 |
| 1970 | #3,311 | 19 |
| 1980 | #3,069 | 28 |
| 1990 | #5,549 | 16 |
| 2000 | #9,874 | 9 |
| 2010 | #13,448 | 7 |
| 2020 | #11,090 | 8 |
Where in the United States
The states that registered Bess most often since 1880. These are lifetime totals, so they track state population as much as local taste — a name common in Wyoming will never out-count California.
| State | Births |
|---|---|
| New York | 213 |
| Texas | 201 |
| Illinois | 117 |
| Pennsylvania | 73 |
| Missouri | 48 |
| Oklahoma | 35 |
| Kentucky | 33 |
| Tennessee | 26 |
| North Carolina | 21 |
| Ohio | 17 |
How these figures are worked out
- Counts come straight from the registrars: the US Social Security Administration (1880–2025) and the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (1900–2025). Nothing is scraped from another names site.
- Ranks are computed against every name in that year's file, not just the ones this site publishes pages for — otherwise a rank would flatter every name we happen to list.
- The curve is drawn on births per 100,000 of that sex, not raw counts. Raw counts across eras are misleading: far more births were registered in 1957 than in 1890, so a flat count is a falling share.
- Each country hides small numbers — the US below 5 births a year, New Zealand below 10. A gap in a line is "below the floor", never "nobody".
SOURCE·US SSA (1880–2025) + NZ DIA (1900–2025) birth registrations·ranks and shares computed from the source files, see method·REVIEWED JUL 2026