Roland
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Renowned In The Land. Roland Was A Legendary Hero Who Served Charlemagne.
- Origin
- German
About the Name Roland
Roland descends from the Old Germanic Hrodland, composed of hrod (fame) and land (land) — yielding "renowned in the land" or "famous throughout the land." The name's overwhelming literary and historical anchor is the iconic Roland (Italian Orlando), the legendary Frankish military leader who served under Charlemagne and died at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778 CE — making him the iconic hero of the iconic 11th-century French epic poem The Song of Roland, one of the foundational works of medieval French literature.
Notable modern bearers include American basketball player Roland Nyama; the contemporary American actor Roland Emmerich (born 1955, the iconic German-American filmmaker of Independence Day 1996 and The Day After Tomorrow 2004); and the iconic American comic-strip character Roland Burt.
Roland held a US top-100 boys' rank from 1880 through 1955. After a long mid-late 20th-century quiet period, the name has been climbing back through the 2010s and 2020s as part of the broader vintage-revival wave alongside Theodore, Otto, and Augustus. Roland climbed back into the US top 300 boys' rank by 2018 and the top 300 since. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the layered Old Germanic-Carolingian-medieval-literary pedigree, the strong Roland epic-poem cultural anchor and Charlemagne-historical anchor, and the popular two-syllable -land ending family (Roland, Garland, Leland). Two firm syllables, soft consonants, and tonal versatility from rural-American to upwardly-mobile-American. The name reads as both classical-Germanic and contemporary American. Common nicknames Roly (the dominant warm short form, casual and warm), Rolly, and the rare Land each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Roland and Rowland have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Orlando (Italian original), Rolando (Spanish/Portuguese), Roland (essentially identical across French/German), Roolant (Dutch), and the original Old Germanic Hrodland.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Roland
US Popularity History (1924–2025)
Annual US births named Roland by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1924 with 1,822 boys named Roland (boy rank #98 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #608 for boys (466 US births). That's 510 places below its 1924 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 Roland 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 Roland the strongest states are Maine, Montana, Idaho.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maine | #225 | 18 |
| 2 | Montana | #246 | 17 |
| 3 | Idaho | #361 | 41 |
| 4 | Oregon | #372 | 94 |
| 5 | Iowa | #432 | 42 |
| 6 | Minnesota | #457 | 117 |
| 7 | Washington | #479 | 145 |
| 8 | Mississippi | #480 | 21 |
| 9 | Wisconsin | #482 | 110 |
| 10 | Missouri | #488 | 103 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Jersey | #848 | 22 |
| 2 | New York | #753 | 153 |
| 3 | Georgia | #710 | 125 |
| 4 | Florida | #709 | 196 |
| 5 | Massachusetts | #661 | 50 |
| 6 | Illinois | #659 | 126 |
| 7 | California | #648 | 412 |
| 8 | North Carolina | #625 | 120 |
| 9 | Texas | #616 | 423 |
| 10 | Maryland | #611 | 72 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Roland in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Famous People Named Roland
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Roland.
- Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, critic and semiotician.
Looking for names like Roland?
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 Roland to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Roland against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).