girl's name
Dream
DREEM
- Origin English
- Gender Girl
- Syllables 1
- Letters 5
- Popularity Top 1000 (US)
- Births on record 8,516
the United States
#432
2025 births
Dream is a girl's name taken from the English word, whose history is unusually strange: the Old English dream meant joy, music and revelry, and the sleeping sense appears to have arrived from Old Norse.
- Dream is a name of English origin.
- Peaked in 2022, when 1,032 babies were given the name.
- It has been rising over the past decade.
- Today about 1 in 4,250 babies in the United States is given this name.
- First appears in US birth records in 1970.
- 1 syllable, with the stress on syllable 1.
Dream over time
Births per decade in the United States, 1970s to 2020s. The striped bar is the 2020s, still in progress — it covers 2020 to 2025, not a full ten years.
Show the numbers
| Decade | Births |
|---|---|
| 1970s | 6 |
| 1990s | 47 |
| 2000s | 576 |
| 2010s | 2,228 |
| 2020s (to 2025) | 5,470 |
What Dream means
Dream now means what the sleeping mind produces, and by extension an ambition. In Old English the same spelling meant joy and music, and how the two senses connect is one of the open questions of English etymology.
Where Dream comes from
Dream is a genuine puzzle. The Old English dream meant joy, mirth, music or the noise of celebration — never sleep. The modern sense appears in Middle English, and the usual explanation is borrowing from the Old Norse draumr, a sleeping vision, with the older English word displaced. Whether the two are the same word that split or two words that collided is not settled. The aspirational sense — a dream as a hope — is nineteenth-century and American. As a given name it appears in our records from 1970 and rose sharply after 2016, when it was given to a daughter of Rob Kardashian.
Dream in use
Dream charts in only three of the seven countries we track and peaked in 2022.
How popular is Dream?
In 2025, Dream was given to 780 babies in the United States, ranking #432 that year. It is a well-established, commonly used name.
Where Dream is used
US figures omit any name given to fewer than five babies in a year, so the rarest names are absent from the source rather than absent from use. Data & sources.
Names that peaked alongside Dream
These names rose and fell in the same era, which is why they tend to sound like they belong together.
Parents who like Dream also like
Names whose popularity has risen and fallen in step with Dream over the last century — the same taste, a different name.
Dream in other languages
The same name as it is spelled elsewhere — not shortenings, and not different names that merely sound alike. Each one has its own record here.
- Other forms
- Forms we hold no single language for — some are used across several, some are simply spelled differently.
- Dreama
Sibling names for Dream
Names from the same era that won't rhyme or share an initial with Dream — the two things that make a sibling set grate.
Common questions about Dream
What does the name Dream mean?
A vision in sleep, or an ambition. Curiously, the Old English dream meant joy and music, and the sleeping sense seems to come from Old Norse.
Is Dream a boy's or a girl's name?
It is given mostly to girls.
How new is the name Dream?
It appears in our records from 1970 but rose sharply only after 2016.
How popular is the name Dream?
In 2025, Dream was given to 780 babies in the United States, ranking #432 that year. It is a well-established, commonly used name.
How many syllables are in Dream?
Dream has 1 syllable.
When was Dream most popular?
Dream peaked in 2022, when 1,032 babies were given the name. It has been rising over the past decade.
Is Dream a good name?
That is not something records can settle, but they can tell you what you would be choosing. Dream currently ranks #432 in the United States. It has been rising over the past decade. Everything else — how it sounds with your surname, who it reminds you of — is yours.