Welles is a rare spelling. It is summarised with Willis, which shares its sound and spelling pattern.
Meaning not yet researched.
Welles: US boys given the name each year, 1880 to 2025, from Social Security card applications. 42 in 2025. Its best rank was #2,437 in 2021.
US births per year · SSA card applications
Peaked at #2,437 in 2021; #2,985 in 2025. Every baby recorded as Welles in 2025 was a boy.
Baby name · US data 1880–2025
#2,985 for US boys in 2025. Its best year was 2021, at #2,437.
Hover, tap or use the arrow keys for any year. Years with fewer than five babies of a sex are not published by SSA and show as zero.
Welles: US boys given the name each year from 1880 to 2025. 42 boys in 2025. Peak: #2,437 in 2021 · most boys in one year: 56 (2021).
In 2025, 42 US boys were named Welles, making it the 2,985th most common boys’ name of the year, up 614 places from #3,599 in 2024. That is 10 more than the 32 boys named Welles in 2024. Its best rank for boys was #2,437, reached in 2021. That year also had the most boys given the name: 56. For comparison, it was #5,048 in 2015 and unranked in 1950.
Social Security card records list Welles in 17 years of the 146 from 1880 to 2025, starting in 1915 with 5 babies. In all, 480 US babies have been given the name, 2.1% of them girls and 98% boys. Its busiest decade was the 2020s, with 242 babies named Welles.
Over the 10 years from 2016 to 2025, 401 US boys were named Welles; the busiest of those years was 2021, with 56. In 2025 that was about 1 in 40,668 of the boys in SSA’s list for the year.
Among the states, Welles ranked highest in New York in 2025, at #1,562 for boys there. It was not in the top 100 of any state. Related spellings in the SSA files include Willis (53,154 babies since 1880).
Meaning not yet researched.
We publish a meaning only with a cited source and a confidence label, and never generate one. Meanings are being researched for the most common names first.
Numbers are all-time US births. Links come from Wikidata’s “said to be the same as” (P460, CC0) and our spelling rule: at most two letters different, with the same sound pattern.
No nicknames listed for Welles in the open dataset we use.
Source: carltonnorthern/nicknames (Apache-2.0).
US boys. Rank within each state. SSA leaves out states where fewer than five boys got the name, so 50 are not listed.
| State | Births 2025 | Rank 2025 | Rank 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 7 | #1,562 | — |
Births and national rank for each year SSA lists the name, newest first.
About the data: counts are Social Security card applications for US births, for names given to at least five babies of a sex in a year (SSA, names.zip, public domain). Ranks follow SSA’s own order: most births first, ties alphabetical. Files retrieved 2026-10-05 (checksum on our sources page).