Stanley

From an English surname meaning “stone clearing,” derived from Old English stan “stone” and leah “woodland, clearing,” Stanley was borne by the British-American explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), who found David Livingstone in Africa, and later became a given name used by the American director Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) and the character Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire.

Stanley rose from #870 to #863 for boys between 2024 and 2025. Its highest annual birth count came in 1954, with 6,448 births.