One subject, in depth · bridged to FuelFacts
NameCurve
Girls' name · 65,734 recorded births

Marcella

#948 in the US in 2025

Where Marcella stands

United States register · 1880–2025

#948girls’ names · US 2025

Marcella was the 948th most registered girls' name in the United States in 2025, on 272 births.

peak 1922 · 1,537188019532025

Its moment was 1922, when 1,537 babies were given it.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

#948US rank, 2025 (girls)
272US births in 2025
#155its best US rank, in 1922
1922peak year — 1,537 births
65,614US births since 1880
120E&W births, 2019–2025
Saved in this browser only — no account, nothing sent anywhere.

How Marcella's figures are worked out

  1. 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. The SSA files are the agency's own, retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. The reporting floor. Each registrar publishes a name only once it clears a threshold — 5 births of that sex in the US, 10 in New Zealand. Expressed as a share that threshold is itself a curve, and it is drawn on every chart here as the shaded band along the base.
  5. A missing year is a suppressed value, never a zero. Where the registrar published nothing, this site prints “below floor” or “<5”, the curve is broken rather than drawn across the gap, and the missing years are marked on the floor line. Marcella was under the floor in no year of its US record.
share per 100,000 = births ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000
reporting floor (share) = 5 ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000

Full methodology →

Marcella in the United States

188019001920194019601980200020200.064128
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 5-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Marcella in the United States, 1880–2025

Between 2016 and 2025 the name has been rising — up 53% as a share of girls' births.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Marcella in New Zealand

Marcella 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

Marcella in England & Wales

In England and Wales, Marcella was registered 120 times between 2019 and 2025, peaking in 2021 with 26 births. It ranked #1,362 for girls in 2025 on 23 births.

2020NOT PUBLISHED — BELOW THE 3-BIRTH FLOOR0.04.79.5
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 3-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Marcella in England and Wales, 2019–2025

Seven years is a window, not a history. Unlike the American and New Zealand series this one cannot show you a name's arrival or its long decline — ONS publishes the full list only from 2019. England and Wales only: Scotland and Northern Ireland publish separately and are not counted here.

SOURCE·Office for National Statistics, baby names in England and Wales·Open Government Licence v3.0. ONS redacts any name given to 2 or fewer babies of that sex that year, under s40 of the Freedom of Information Act.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Decade by decade in the US

US rank and births at each decade markSSA · JUL 2026
YearRankBirths
1880#44914
1890#38243
1900#293125
1910#218295
1920#1611,404
1930#1861,035
1940#237715
1950#300673
1960#379628
1970#430511
1980#531356
1990#758272
2000#1,021206
2010#1,456155
2020#1,031243

<5 = the SSA published no figure for that year. It is a suppressed value, not a zero.

Where in the United States

The states that registered Marcella 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.

StateBirths
Illinois4,797
California4,712
Pennsylvania4,640
Ohio4,371
New York3,427
Wisconsin3,121
Minnesota3,005
Texas2,529
Michigan2,525
Missouri2,486

Questions about Marcella

How popular is the name Marcella?

Marcella ranked #948 for girls in the United States in 2025, on 272 births registered with the Social Security Administration.

When was Marcella most popular?

Marcella peaked in 1922, when 1,537 babies in the United States were given the name.

Is Marcella rising or falling?

Measured as a share of all girls' births, Marcella has been rising between 2016 and 2025 (+53%).

Same sex, peaking within a few years of 1922, at a comparable scale. Not a taste engine — this is arithmetic on peak years, which is why it will occasionally hand you something unfashionable that is nonetheless exactly of the period.

SOURCE·US SSA (1880–2025) + NZ DIA (1900–2025) birth registrations·ranks and shares computed from the source files, see method·REVIEWED JUL 2026

See what every site in this family answers

Published by

Amit Sharma

Auckland real-estate agent and marketer. Builds free, sourced data tools.