Prince
- Pronunciation
- [Prince]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Principal One: First. The Rock Musician Prince.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Prince
Prince descends from the Latin princeps meaning "first" or "chief" — originally referring in Roman antiquity to the principal citizens of the Roman Senate (the princeps senatus), and later evolving in medieval European usage to refer to the eldest son of a monarch or to the ruler of a small sovereign state.
The name's overwhelming modern cultural anchor is American musician Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson, 1958–2016, the iconic American singer-songwriter-producer whose career through Purple Rain 1984, Sign O' the Times 1987, and Diamonds and Pearls 1991 made him one of the foundational figures of late-20th-century American music). Prince's stage name was actually his birth name, given to him by his father John L. Nelson — anchoring the first-name usage in late-20th-century American memory.
Prince's American climb has been substantial: the name climbed from outside the US top 1000 in 1980 to the US top 300 boys' rank by 2014 and the top 300 since. The name has been driven primarily by African-American naming and the strong Prince Nelson cultural anchor. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the in-built royal-aristocratic register, the strong Prince Nelson cultural anchor, and the compact one-syllable structure with the distinctive Pr-Nce consonant rhythm. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — the rare Prinny and Prinze each occasionally appear; the alternate spellings Prince and Prynce have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Príncipe (Spanish/Portuguese), Principe (Italian), Prinz (German), and the original Latin princeps.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Prince
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Prince by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2019 with 1,162 boys named Prince (boy rank #297 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #447 for boys (703 US births). That's 150 places below its 2019 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 Prince 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 Prince the strongest states are District of Columbia, Georgia, Delaware.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | #164 | 60 |
| 2 | Georgia | #182 | 640 |
| 3 | Delaware | #221 | 21 |
| 4 | Florida | #227 | 854 |
| 5 | New York | #252 | 723 |
| 6 | North Carolina | #252 | 436 |
| 7 | Mississippi | #253 | 139 |
| 8 | Nevada | #259 | 122 |
| 9 | South Carolina | #264 | 185 |
| 10 | Maryland | #296 | 198 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Washington | #729 | 89 |
| 2 | Oregon | #639 | 16 |
| 3 | Utah | #620 | 20 |
| 4 | Colorado | #586 | 75 |
| 5 | California | #529 | 567 |
| 6 | Kansas | #500 | 50 |
| 7 | Arizona | #489 | 159 |
| 8 | Missouri | #487 | 120 |
| 9 | Kentucky | #485 | 74 |
| 10 | Iowa | #472 | 56 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Prince in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Princeton | Principal One: First. The Rock Musician Prince. | Male | English |
Looking for names like Prince?
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 Prince to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Prince 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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