Dennis

Where Dennis comes from

From Middle English Denis, from Old French saint's name Denis, brought to England by Normans; from Latin Dionysius, a masculine name literally meaning “follower of (the wine god) Dionysus”.
— Wiktionary's entry for Dennis
  • Ancient Greek
  • 2 syllables
Along the way
  1. 1880
    First SSA year
    Already #105 among boys — 128 babies in the first year on record.
  2. 1900
    Dennis Gabor born
    Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography
  3. 1941
    Dennis M. Ritchie born
    American computer scientist, co-inventor of the Unix operating system and the C programming language
  4. 1949
    Peak, #16
    21,746 babies named Dennis — more than any year before or since.
  5. 1962
    The fade
    The first year with half the peak's births — down to #37.
In the dictionary
  • A male given name from Ancient Greek.
Namesakes
  • Dennis M. Ritchie · American computer scientist, co-inventor of the Unix operating system and the C programming language, 1941–2011
  • Dennis Gabor · Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography, 1900–1979
  • Dennis Hopper · American actor and film director, 1936–2010
  • Dennis Bergkamp · Dutch association football player, born 1969
  • Dennis Quaid · American actor, born 1954

Sources: the origin note and dictionary entry are quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0); the namesakes come from Wikidata (CC0); the milestones are worked out from the SSA record.