Denver
Meaning
place name, "green valley"
The story
Denver is the green valley of the old English reading and the mile-high city of the modern American ear, and it joins the place-name register this site has assembled, Milan, Cairo, London, with a difference: Denver was never a fad. The record shows about 1,000 to 1,900 a decade from the 1910s through the 2000s, a century of steady, mostly rural use, before the place-name wave found it: 3,900 in the 2010s and already 5,600 so far this decade, past the full total. The split is genuinely shared: about 2,000 girls to 3,600 boys this decade, a real minority share of the Lennox kind. In our records: about 19,200 boys to 4,200 girls all-time. A century of quiet, then the wave: the valley was always green; America just finally looked west.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Denver peaked in the 2020s.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
207 people · the #24,776 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 1,000,000 · median age 25
Among people named Denver living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1980s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 64 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Denver deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Denver 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 Denver fits with your family’s names and surname.
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