Doris
- Pronunciation
- [Dor-is]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Of The Sea
- Origin
- Greek
About the Name Doris
Doris comes from ancient Greek mythology: the Dorians were one of the major ethnic groups of ancient Greece, and Doris was both a geographic region (in central Greece) and a sea-nymph in Greek mythology — one of the fifty daughters of the Titan Oceanus and Tethys, associated with the bounty and depths of the sea. The Greek root is connected to doron (gift) and to the Dorian people, giving the name a layered classical heritage that blends place, mythology, and etymology.
The name appears in the SSA top-1000 from 1902 and reached its national peak of #6 in 1929, accumulating more than 410,000 recorded top-1000 births across its 52-year chart run. Among its notable bearers: Doris Lessing (1919–2013) was a British novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose more than fifty books traced colonial Africa, postwar London, communist disillusion, feminism, science fiction, and old age — a body of work that earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature. Doris last appeared in the SSA top-1000 in 1954, at rank #93.
Doris carries the crisp elegance of a Golden Age Hollywood name — it peaked in the late 1920s and remained a top-100 staple through the 1930s before a long, graceful decline. Its two-syllable shape and classical Greek lineage give it an understated weight. Recorded variants include Dori, Dorian, Dorie, Dorrit, and Dory.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Doris
US Popularity History (1902–1954)
Annual US births named Doris by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1928 with 16,574 girls named Doris (girl rank #7 that year).
Where it stands today: in 1954, ranked #93 for girls (4,457 US births). That's 86 places below its 1928 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
Famous People Named Doris
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Doris.
- Doris Lessing was a British novelist, playwright and short story writer.
Looking for names like Doris?
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 Doris to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Doris against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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