← Fame through time1880-1889
The 1880s
Whose names filled the books of the 1880s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in English books during the 1880s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus59 - 2
Augustus10 - 3
Homer10 - 4
Plato9.5 - 5
Cicero8.3 - 6
Aristotle7.9 - 7
Virgil5.7 - 8
Socrates4.9 - 9
Herodotus4.0 - 10
Plutarch3.1 - 11
Charlemagne3.0 - 12
Walter Scott2.8 - 13
Ovid2.6 - 14
Demosthenes2.3 - 15
George Eliot2.3 - 16
Cleopatra2.3 - 17
Euclid2.2 - 18
William Henry2.2 - 19
Origen2.2 - 20
Livy2.1 - 21
Bede2.1 - 22
Xenophon2.0 - 23
James II, Count of Urgell2.0 - 24
Johns Hopkins1.9 - 25
John the Baptist1.9
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1880s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Vincent van Gogh12 decades - 2
Oscar Wilde14 decades - 3
Thomas Edison13 decades - 4
Alexander Graham Bell15 decades - 5
Arthur Rimbaud14 decades - 6
Antoni Gaudí5 decades - 7
Robert Louis Stevenson15 decades - 8
Guy de Maupassant14 decades - 9
Paul von Hindenburg10 decades - 10
Alexander III of Russia16 decades - 11
Paul Gauguin13 decades - 12
Bram Stoker12 decades - 13
Emperor Meiji11 decades - 14
Ivan Pavlov16 decades - 15
Cecil Rhodes12 decades - 16
Wilhelm Röntgen11 decades - 17
Pope Benedict XV11 decades - 18
José Martí16 decades - 19
Ludwig II of Bavarianot measured- - 20
Billy the Kid12 decades - 21
Henri Poincaré13 decades - 22
H. H. Asquith11 decades - 23
Ferdinand Foch7 decades - 24
Annie Besant15 decades - 25
George I of Greece0 decades
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.