Mildred
- Pronunciation
- [Mil-dred]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Mild Of Strength
- Origin
- English
About the Name Mildred
Mildred traces to the Old English compound Mildthryth, built from milde (gentle, mild) and thryth (strength, power) — yielding a meaning of "gentle strength" or "mild of strength." Like many Old English compound names, it was borne by Anglo-Saxon royalty and saints: Saint Mildred of Thanet was a seventh-century abbess venerated in Kent, giving the name early religious currency. The Norman Conquest pushed Old English names out of fashion for centuries, but Mildred was revived in the Victorian era as part of a broader Anglo-Saxon nostalgia in English-speaking culture.
The name appears in the SSA top-1000 from 1887 and reached its national peak of #6 in 1912, accumulating more than 405,000 recorded top-1000 births across its 58-year chart run. That early-twentieth-century peak placed Mildred firmly among the dominant names of the Edwardian and World War I generation. The name last appeared in the SSA top-1000 in 1945, at rank #93 — a gradual exit through the wartime years.
Mildred is today a firmly vintage name, carrying the combined weight of Anglo-Saxon etymology, saintly history, and early-twentieth-century American domesticity. It belongs to the cluster of Old English revival names — Ethel, Edna, Mabel, Mildred — that some contemporary parents are beginning to reconsider as genuinely distinctive options. Recorded variants include Mildrid and Millie.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Mildred
US Popularity History (1887–1945)
Annual US births named Mildred by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1920 with 18,060 girls named Mildred (girl rank #6 that year).
Where it stands today: in 1945, ranked #93 for girls (2,960 US births). That's 87 places below its 1920 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Variant Forms
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Compare Mildred to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Mildred against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).