Is Dakota a male or female name?
Dakota is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in England and Wales at 89% and male usage in United States at 69%. Country context changes the answer.
Result without a country hint
This is the response used when the request does not supply a country. It is a fallback, not a claim that every country has the same distribution.
- Association
- male
- Probability
- 68%
- Sample size
- 142,558
- Confidence
- high
Dakota by country
Only sources that publish observation counts appear in this table. The probability is the dominant-gender share within that country source; sample sizes from different countries cover different years and should not be treated as population rankings.
| Country | Association | Probability | Sample | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States US | male | 69% | 132,318 | ssa |
| Canada CA | male | 59% | 7,041 | statcan |
| England and Wales GB | female | 89% | 2,350 | ons |
| Spain ES | female | 100% | 475 | ine |
| France FR | female | 89% | 220 | insee |
| Ireland IE | female | 97% | 93 | cso |
| Switzerland CH | female | 74% | 31 | bfs |
| Poland PL | female | 92% | 24 | pesel |
| Austria AT | female | 67% | 6 | statat |
Attested in 11 countries and territories
Presence means the name appears in a source for that country. Sources without counts cannot support a popularity share.
AT · AU · BE · CA · CH · ES · FR · GB · IE · PL · US
Dakota over time
In the United States, 37.1% of the babies named Dakota in the 1970s were girls, against 54.7% in the 2020s. In France, 85.7% of the babies named Dakota in the 2010s were girls.
| Decade of birth | United States: girls | Babies | France: girls | Babies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1970s | 37% | 286 | — | |
| 1980s | 19% | 3,022 | — | |
| 1990s | 16% | 55,799 | — | |
| 2000s | 31% | 40,560 | — | |
| 2010s | 56% | 21,792 | 86% | 105 |
| 2020s | 55% | 10,740 | — |
Births per decade from the US Social Security Administration (1880–2024) and INSEE (France, 1900–2025); decades with fewer than 100 babies are left out. See boys' names that became girls' names and French names that changed sex.
Look up Dakota with a country
Send a reliable two-letter country code when you have one. Preserve probability, sample size, confidence and source with the category.
curl "https://namegender.com/api/v1/gender?name=Dakota&country=US" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ng_live_xxxxxxxxxxxx"Copy failed. Select and copy the text.
Method and limits
Counted rows come from national registration sources that publish male and female totals. The attested-country list also includes sources that confirm presence but do not publish a sample size. Those two evidence types are kept separate.
Name data describes a population-level association. It does not identify an individual person's gender. Preserve unknown and low-confidence results, and do not use name inference for employment, medical, financial, insurance, legal or eligibility decisions.
Data version: 2026.10. Read the benchmark methodology and database provenance before applying a threshold.
Questions about Dakota
Is Dakota a male or female name?
Dakota is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in England and Wales at 89% and male usage in United States at 69%. Country context changes the answer.
Why can the result for Dakota change by country?
A name can have different observed distributions in different populations. A country hint narrows the evidence used by the API instead of treating one global result as universal.
Does the name Dakota identify a person's gender?
No. This page describes statistical associations in name records. It cannot identify an individual person and should not be used for consequential decisions.