← Fame through time1990-1999
The 1990s
Whose names filled the books of the 1990s - 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 1990s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus46 - 2
Aristotle9.6 - 3
Plato7.9 - 4
Homer4.8 - 5
Johns Hopkins4.8 - 6
Socrates4.4 - 7
George Washington3.8 - 8
Augustus3.2 - 9
Cicero2.9 - 10
Virgil2.7 - 11
Bill Clinton2.0 - 12
Saddam Hussein1.9 - 13
Thomas Jefferson1.9 - 14
Ronald Reagan1.8 - 15
Ovid1.7 - 16
John F. Kennedy1.5 - 17
Mark Twain1.5 - 18
Abraham Lincoln1.5 - 19Ababa1.4
- 20
Plutarch1.3 - 21
Cleopatra1.3 - 22
Euclid1.2 - 23
Galen1.2 - 24
Walt Disney1.2 - 25
Rembrandt1.2
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1990s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Michael Jackson5 decades - 2
Barack Obama2 decades - 3
Steve Jobs4 decades - 4
Pope Leo XIV0 decades - 5
Madonnanot measured- - 6
Osama bin Laden3 decades - 7
Diego Maradona4 decades - 8
Bill Gates4 decades - 9
Brad Pitt3 decades - 10
Nicolás Maduro2 decades - 11
Michael Jordan4 decades - 12
Diana, Princess of Wales0 decades - 13
Kamala Harris1 decades - 14
Johnny Depp3 decades - 15
Tom Cruise4 decades - 16
Tom Hanks4 decades - 17
Tupac Shakur3 decades - 18
Keanu Reeves3 decades - 19
Whitney Houston4 decades - 20
Keir Starmer0 decades - 21
Sandra Bullock3 decades - 22
Jim Carrey3 decades - 23
George Clooney3 decades - 24
Bruce Willis4 decades - 25
Jeff Bezos2 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.