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Fame through time · 759,908 people placed in time

Who mattered, century by century

Lasting fame is fame that others keep repeating. The most notable people of every century, and how often the world went on printing their names, decade by decade, in their own language. Each century holds the people whose working lives fell in it, ranked here by Wikipedia coverage and readers together; its all-time ranking orders the same people by all-time score.

Famous after deathList

People whose names were printed far more after they died than while they lived.

Most printedDecade by decade

Whose names filled the books of the 1850s, or of any decade since 1800.

How to read these rankings

  • Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
  • Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
  • Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.