Gale — unisex name

What the Data Says About Gale

The Social Security Administration has registered 19,906 babies named Gale between 1893 and 2023, spanning 131 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Gale currently falls outside the top 1,000 girls' names for 2023. The name reached its historical peak in 1957, when 1,210 babies received it in a single year. Gale is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 12,424 additional births since 1883.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Gale performed strongest in the 1950s, accumulating 9,479 births during that ten-year window. Across the 14 decades of recorded activity, Gale shows a clear decline from its mid-century high. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in New York, which accounts for 2,150 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by California and Pennsylvania. In total, SSA state-level files list Gale in 47 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Gale in our reference dataset. These figures derive from SSA's annual national and state-level name files, which include any name appearing at least five times in a given year or state-year; names below that threshold are suppressed for privacy and therefore excluded from the totals shown here. The 19,906 total represents a lower bound — actual usage may be higher in years or states where the count fell below the disclosure floor. This page is provided for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute personal, legal, or naming advice.