← Fame through time1900-1909
The 1900s
Whose names filled the books of the 1900s - 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 1900s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus43 - 2
Augustus9.2 - 3
Homer8.8 - 4
Plato7.3 - 5
Cicero6.2 - 6
Aristotle5.9 - 7
Virgil4.3 - 8
Johns Hopkins4.1 - 9
Socrates3.5 - 10
George Washington2.4 - 11
Plutarch2.3 - 12
William Henry2.3 - 13
Abraham Lincoln2.3 - 14
Herodotus2.3 - 15
Charlemagne2.3 - 16
Cleopatra2.2 - 17
Euclid2.1 - 18
Walter Scott2.0 - 19
Ovid1.9 - 20
John Smith1.8 - 21
Demosthenes1.7 - 22
Rembrandt1.6 - 23
Euripides1.6 - 24
John the Baptist1.5 - 25
Pericles1.5
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1900s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Winston Churchill13 decades - 2
Vladimir Lenin12 decades - 3
Mahatma Gandhi10 decades - 4
Marie Curie4 decades - 5
George V16 decades - 6
Grigori Rasputin11 decades - 7
Herbert Hoover11 decades - 8
Nicholas II of Russia14 decades - 9
Sun Yat-sen12 decades - 10
Calvin Coolidge11 decades - 11
Warren G. Harding11 decades - 12
Rudyard Kipling13 decades - 13
Frank Lloyd Wright12 decades - 14
Rosa Luxemburg13 decades - 15
Neville Chamberlain16 decades - 16
H. G. Wells16 decades - 17
Bertrand Russell13 decades - 18
Harry Houdini7 decades - 19
Marcel Proust12 decades - 20
Henri Matisse12 decades - 21
Sergei Rachmaninoffnot measured- - 22
Robert Frost13 decades - 23
W. B. Yeats12 decades - 24
G. K. Chesterton12 decades - 25
Beatrix Potter10 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.