← 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 Spanish books during the 1980s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Simón Bolívar8.1 - 2
Andrés Bello6.9 - 3
Fidel Castro5.9 - 4
Francis Xavier5.7 - 5
John of God5.3 - 6
Lope de Vega5.2 - 7
Rubén Darío4.6 - 8
Porfirio Díaz4.2 - 9
Octavio Paz3.5 - 10
Benito Juárez3.5 - 11
Antonio Machado3.2 - 12
Christopher Columbus3.2 - 13
Juan Ramón Jiménez3.1 - 14
Hernán Cortés2.8 - 15
Venustiano Carranza2.5 - 16
Felipe González2.4 - 17
John of the Cross2.4 - 18
Pablo Neruda2.3 - 19Juan Fernández2.2
- 20
Jorge Luis Borges2.1 - 21
Juan Vicente Gómez2.1 - 22
Bartolomé de las Casas2.0 - 23
Gabriela Mistral2.0 - 24
Alan García1.9 - 25
Federico García Lorca1.9
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.