← Fame through time1980-1989
The 1980s
Whose names filled the books of the 1980s - 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 1980s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus30 - 2
Aristotle7.0 - 3
Plato6.1 - 4
Johns Hopkins4.8 - 5
Homer4.4 - 6
George Washington3.4 - 7
Socrates3.1 - 8
Augustus2.8 - 9
Ronald Reagan2.7 - 10
Virgil2.4 - 11
Cicero2.3 - 12
Thomas Jefferson1.5 - 13Ababa1.4
- 14
Mark Twain1.4 - 15
John F. Kennedy1.3 - 16
Ovid1.3 - 17
Jimmy Carter1.2 - 18
Woodrow Wilson1.1 - 19
Euclid1.1 - 20
Brigham Young1.1 - 21
Rembrandt1.1 - 22
Indira Gandhi1.1 - 23
Adam Smith1.0 - 24
Abraham Lincoln1.0 - 25
Cleopatra1.00
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1980s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Donald Trump4 decades - 2
Vladimir Putin3 decades - 3
George W. Bush4 decades - 4
Xi Jinping3 decades - 5
Bill Clinton4 decades - 6
Benjamin Netanyahu4 decades - 7
Freddie Mercury3 decades - 8
Robin Williams7 decades - 9
Steven Spielberg5 decades - 10
Arnold Schwarzenegger4 decades - 11
Narendra Modi2 decades - 12
Jackie Channot measured- - 13
David Bowie5 decades - 14
Meryl Streep4 decades - 15
Bob Marley5 decades - 16
Dolly Parton5 decades - 17
Stephen King8 decades - 18
Sylvester Stallone5 decades - 19
Hugo Chávez3 decades - 20
Hillary Clinton3 decades - 21
Chernot measured- - 22
Elton John5 decades - 23
Ozzy Osbourne3 decades - 24
Pablo Escobar4 decades - 25
John Travolta5 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.