← 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 - 26
Plutarch1.00 - 27
Henry James0.97 - 28
Jawaharlal Nehru0.93 - 29
Galen0.92 - 30
Theodore Roosevelt0.91 - 31
Benjamin Franklin0.90 - 32
Herodotus0.88 - 33
Euripides0.84 - 34
Mahatma Gandhi0.82 - 35
Prince George, Duke of Cumberland0.81 - 36
Winston Churchill0.81 - 37
Ramakrishna0.80 - 38
John the Baptist0.79 - 39
Charlemagne0.78 - 40
Richard Nixon0.77 - 41
James Madison0.74 - 42
Rajiv Gandhi0.73 - 43
William Henry0.73 - 44
Bede0.73 - 45
Virginia Woolf0.72 - 46
George Eliot0.71 - 47
Sophocles0.71 - 48
Henry Ford0.70 - 49
Origen0.70 - 50
John Adams0.70 - 51
Pol Pot0.69 - 52
Walt Disney0.67 - 53
Solon0.66 - 54
Jane Austen0.66 - 55
Hadrian0.64 - 56
John Henry0.64 - 57
Livy0.63 - 58
Thucydides0.62 - 59
Andrew Jackson0.62 - 60
Ho Chi Minh0.62 - 61
Margaret Thatcher0.62 - 62
T. S. Eliot0.62 - 63
Aeschylus0.59 - 64
Ahab0.59 - 65
James Joyce0.59 - 66
Thomas Aquinas0.58 - 67
Julius Caesar0.57 - 68
Lyndon B. Johnson0.57 - 69
Walt Whitman0.57 - 70
Pindar0.56 - 71
John Smith0.55 - 72
Aristophanes0.54 - 73
John Deere0.53 - 74
Jefferson Davis0.52 - 75
Ezra Pound0.52 - 76
Boethius0.51 - 77
William Morris0.51 - 78
Juniper0.50 - 79
Sukarno0.50 - 80
Alexander the Great0.50 - 81
Plotinus0.50 - 82
Richard II0.50 - 83
John Marshall0.49 - 84
Charles Dickens0.49 - 85
Walter Scott0.48 - 86
Alexander Hamilton0.48 - 87
Pericles0.47 - 88
Hosea0.47 - 89
John Wesley0.47 - 90
Xenophon0.47 - 91
Emily Dickinson0.47 - 92
Hippocrates0.47 - 93
Black Hawk0.46 - 94
Thomas More0.46 - 95
Frank Lloyd0.46 - 96
Pythagoras0.45 - 97
Trajan0.45 - 98
Hesiod0.45 - 99
Lucretius0.44 - 100
Joseph Smith0.44
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.