Lou — #2524 US unisex name

What the Data Says About Lou

The Social Security Administration has registered 34,043 babies named Lou between 1880 and 2024, spanning 145 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Lou currently holds the #2524 rank among girls for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 1954, when 1,495 babies received it in a single year. Lou is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 4,006 additional births since 1880.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Lou performed strongest in the 1950s, accumulating 9,084 births during that ten-year window. Across the 15 decades of recorded activity, Lou shows a clear decline from its mid-century high. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in Texas, which accounts for 3,052 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by North Carolina and Kentucky. In total, SSA state-level files list Lou in 47 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Lou 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 34,043 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.