David has appeared in the U.S. top 35 every single year since the SSA began keeping records in 1880. That is 144 consecutive years inside the top 35 — a span matched by only a handful of names in American naming history. The biblical king's name has outlasted nearly every fashion that has come and gone around it.
The shepherd, the king, the psalmist
David comes from the Hebrew Dawid, traditionally rendered as "beloved." The biblical David is among the most fully drawn figures in the Hebrew Bible — shepherd boy, harpist, slayer of Goliath, king of Israel, alleged author of many of the Psalms, ancestor in both the Jewish messianic line and the Christian genealogy of Jesus. His narrative crosses Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition (where he appears as Dawud, a prophet and king).
The American history of the name is anchored in colonial Protestant naming, then sustained through 20th-century Jewish-American migration patterns. David Ben-Gurion served as the first prime minister of Israel; David Bowie redefined the name's pop-culture register; David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, David Attenborough each anchored it in a different cultural domain.
The 1955 peak in context
David reached its modern American peak in 1955, when over 87,000 boys received the name in a single year — making it among the most-given boys' names of the entire 20th century. The mid-century surge corresponded with broad post-war Jewish-American family formation, evangelical Protestant Old Testament naming, and a general American preference for short biblical names with formal weight.
The name's nickname options are consistent and durable: Dave (the dominant adult form), Davey or Davy (childhood diminutive), and the Spanish Davi or David (with the second syllable stressed differently). Common pairings on naming forums: David James, David Michael, David Paul.
The counter-reading: is David out of fashion?
The conventional 2025 framing treats David as slightly past its moment — too associated with the mid-20th century to feel current. The SSA data partially supports this: David has fallen from its 1955 peak to a 2024 rank around #31, the lowest position the name has occupied since the 1930s.
The fuller reading is that David is not declining; it is normalising. After seventy years of unusually high concentration, the name is settling back to its historical baseline of "deeply familiar but not overrepresented." That is the same arc John followed a generation earlier, and Michael is following a generation later. For parents in 2025, choosing David means choosing a name that will be recognised by every generation of the child's life without ever feeling tied to any single one of them. The bicultural portability — identical spelling and recognition in English, Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew — remains one of the name's quiet structural advantages.