Dalton
Meaning
place name, "valley settlement"
The story
Dalton is an English place name, the valley settlement, and its record holds one of the ledger's steepest single turns: a quiet century between about 60 and 1,600 a decade, then 36,200 in the 1990s, more than twenty times over in one step, the decade after a philosophical bouncer with the name kept order in the era's most rewatched roadhouse; the record shows the timing, and timing is all a record can show. The settle has been orderly: 26,300 in the 2000s, 10,600 in the 2010s, and 3,800 so far this decade, nearly all boys, about 85,700 to 430 all-time. The outlaw Dalton gang gave the surname its first American fame a century earlier, which the name wears lightly now: a valley in the root, a legend on each end, and a curve in between that jumped like a struck match.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Dalton peaked in the 1990s and the 2000s in nearly equal measure.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
8,078 people · the #1,972 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 25,000 · median age 39
Among people named Dalton living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1980s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 61 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Dalton deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Dalton truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Dalton fits with your family’s names and surname.
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