Milton
- Pronunciation
- [Mil-ton]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- From The Mill Farm
- Origin
- English
About the Name Milton
Milton is an English surname-turned-given-name meaning "from the mill farm" — a topographic description of origin that was common in the English system of hereditary surnames. The mil- element derives from Old English myln ("mill"), combined with tun ("settlement" or "enclosure"), producing a name rooted in the working agricultural landscape of medieval England. Like many English place-name surnames, Milton crossed from family name to given name over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, partly through the enormous prestige of the poet John Milton.
Three notable bearers are documented here. Milton Avery, born on March 7, 1885 in Sand Bank (now Altmar), New York, moved to East Hartford, Connecticut in 1898, left school at sixteen to work in a factory, and took evening art classes — a biography that captures the self-taught origins of his artistic career. Milton Berle, born Mendel Berlinger on July 12, 1908 in Harlem, New York, the fourth of five children of Moses Berlinger and Sarah Glantz, became one of the defining figures of early American television. Milton Friedman, born on July 31, 1912 in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Beregszász (then in Hungary), grew up in Rahway, New Jersey after his family moved there when he was a year old — the early years of the economist who would become one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century economic thought.
Milton entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 1880, peaked in 1912 at its best rank of #64, and maintained a remarkably long presence — last appearing in 2008 at #935 with 218 births. Its 51,895 total tracked births span over a century of SSA data. The sole recorded variant is Milty, a familiar diminutive.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Milton
US Popularity History (1880–2008)
Annual US births named Milton by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1920 with 2,592 boys named Milton (boy rank #74 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2008, ranked #935 for boys (218 US births). That's 861 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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Where in the US Is Milton Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Milton the strongest states are Maryland, Louisiana, Georgia.
Strongest boys-name states
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Milton in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Famous People Named Milton
3 notable figures from history and culture who share the name Milton.
- Milton Avery was one of the most distinguished American modern painters of the 20th century.
- Milton Berle was one of the highly acclaimed stand-up comedians of his time.
- Milton Friedman was an American economist, statistician and writer who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades.
Looking for names like Milton?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Milton to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Milton against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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