Legend
Meaning
from the word "legend"
The story
Legend is a word name doing something word names rarely manage. It comes through Old French from the Latin legenda, things to be read, which in medieval use meant the account of a saint's life read aloud on their feast day. So the oldest sense is not fame at all. It is a text, and specifically a text about someone else. English kept widening it until it meant the story that outlives the person, and now a small number of American families have handed it back to a person. It is overwhelmingly a boys' name in our records, about 25,800 boys to 970 girls, and it is genuinely new: roughly 220 babies in the 1990s, 930 in the 2000s, 9,700 in the 2010s, and nearly 15,900 so far this decade.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Legend peaked in the 2020s.
When you meet Legend
Most people given the name Legend in the United States are children or teenagers today. The name belongs to this generation.
Estimated from US Social Security birth registrations and typical lifespans; a rough guide, not a rule.
The Legend deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Legend 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 Legend fits with your family’s names and surname.
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