Kim
Girls' name · Late 20th-century
- Living in the US
- ~185,500 survival-weighted estimate
- 2025 rank
- #4,172 among girls
- Births in 2025
- 40 214,768 since 1880
- Typical age
- 63 years, median
Kim popularity over time
The high point was 1960: 13,635 births recorded as Kim. It first clears the SSA reporting threshold in 1912. It has held a top-100 place in 16 separate years.
In 2025 it ranked #4,172 with 40 births. Compared with 2015, births are down 52%. Year on year the rank improved by 600.
How many people are named Kim?
Roughly 185,500 Kims are alive in the US right now. That is out of 214,768 recorded births since 1880. The split is about 159,700 women and 25,700 men.
This is a survival-weighted estimate, not a headcount: every recorded birth year is multiplied by the chance someone born that year is still alive, using the SSA period life table. How the estimate works.
How old is the average Kim?
Half of living Kims are older than 63, half younger. More of them were born in the 1960s than in any other decade. By the site’s era rules that makes Kim a late 20th-century name.
Your Kim
Is Kim a boy's or a girl's name?
The name leans girls, but 17.4% of births in the last decade were boys. Across the whole record, 83.7% of births under the name were girls. The name has changed sides: it began mostly on one sex and ends mostly on the other.
Kim in England and Wales
ONS recorded 7 births named Kim in 2025, ranking it #3,333.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Counts below three are suppressed by ONS.
Where the name Kim comes from
A shortening of Kimball and Kimberley as a male name, and of Kimberley and Kimberly as a female name.
Etymology summarised from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wiktionary entry.
Notable people named Kim
| Name | Known for | Years | Editions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Kim Basinger | American actress | 1953 | 92 |
|
Kim Clijsters | Belgian tennis player | 1983 | 73 |
|
Kim Campbell | 19th Prime Minister of Canada in 1993 | 1947 | 67 |
|
Kim Novak | American actress | 1933 | 60 |
|
Kim Cattrall | British–Canadian actress | 1956 | 55 |
|
Kim Wilde | English pop singer | 1960 | 53 |
|
Kim Hunter | American actress | 1922–2002 | 49 |
|
Kim Philby | KGB mole for the Soviet Union | 1912–1988 | 47 |
Photo credits (8)
- Kim Basinger — Kevin Paul, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Kim Clijsters — User:Vegafi, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Kim Campbell — Simon Fraser University - University Communications, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Kim Novak — Robert Malloy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Kim Cattrall — UKinUSA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Kim Wilde — Andrew D. Hurley, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Kim Hunter — Unknown authorUnknown author, distributed by: Universal-International Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Kim Philby, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The sharpest rise. Births under this name jumped from 265 in 1945 to 597 in 1946 — 2.3 times over in a single year.
Birth records contain the rise and nothing about its cause. This site does not supply one.
People and dates from Wikidata (CC0), limited to those with an English Wikipedia article who are known by this name as their first name.
Names similar to Kim
Matched by sound and spelling inside this dataset, then ordered by total recorded births. This is not a claim about shared etymology.
Related pages
- All names from 1960
- Top names of 2025
- Names beginning with K
- Every year, 1880 to 2025
- Names by state
Get this data
Every number on this page is available as JSON:
/api/name/kim.json.
Free to use with attribution (CC BY 4.0).