Ellie
- Pronunciation
- [El-lie]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Abbreviation Of Eleanor And Ellen.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Ellie
Ellie originated as a pet form of longer El- names: Eleanor, Ellen, Elizabeth, Eliana, and others. The transition from nickname to standalone first name in English-speaking countries is a 20th-century phenomenon, accelerating particularly in the 1990s and 2000s. SSA records show fewer than 50 baby Ellies annually before 1970; by the 2010s the name had crossed 5,000 annually as a standalone given.
The name's appeal sits at the intersection of contemporary American naming preferences: short, vowel-rich, soft consonants, and a tonal warmth that crosses easily from baby to adult registers. Ellie's broader cultural visibility is reinforced by several contemporary fictional bearers — most notably Ellie Williams, the protagonist of the video-game series The Last of Us (2013, 2020) and its 2023 HBO television adaptation. Earlier, Pixar's animated film Up (2009) featured the character Ellie Fredricksen, whose silent montage opening became one of the most acclaimed sequences in animation.
Ellie climbed into the US top 25 girls' rank by 2018 and has remained there. The name reads as instantly approachable but not childish — a quality shared by short modern girls' names like Mia, Ava, and Lily. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — El and the rare Elles occasionally appear. The longer formal extensions Eleanor, Ellen, Eliana, Elliot, and Elise are commonly used as Ellie's official-document version. There are no significant international variants since the name's standalone use is essentially modern English-speaking, though the German Elli is a parallel form.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Ellie
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Ellie by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2024 with 6,306 girls named Ellie (girl rank #21 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #24 for girls (6,176 US births). That's 3 places below its 2024 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 Ellie Most Popular?
Average girl-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 girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Ellie the strongest states are Utah, North Dakota, Idaho.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utah | #15 | 1,065 |
| 2 | North Dakota | #16 | 248 |
| 3 | Idaho | #19 | 406 |
| 4 | Kentucky | #19 | 1,014 |
| 5 | West Virginia | #19 | 413 |
| 6 | Oklahoma | #20 | 767 |
| 7 | Iowa | #21 | 655 |
| 8 | Tennessee | #23 | 1,455 |
| 9 | Kansas | #24 | 592 |
| 10 | Hawaii | #24 | 187 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | #140 | 56 |
| 2 | New Jersey | #67 | 963 |
| 3 | Rhode Island | #67 | 112 |
| 4 | Connecticut | #66 | 374 |
| 5 | New York | #65 | 1,983 |
| 6 | Maryland | #58 | 664 |
| 7 | New Mexico | #55 | 217 |
| 8 | Massachusetts | #54 | 856 |
| 9 | Delaware | #51 | 106 |
| 10 | Vermont | #51 | 79 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Ellie in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Looking for names like Ellie?
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 Ellie to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Ellie 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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