← 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 - 26
Woodrow Wilson1.2 - 27
Brigham Young1.2 - 28
Adam Smith1.1 - 29
Herodotus1.1 - 30
John the Baptist1.1 - 31
Theodore Roosevelt1.0 - 32
Euripides1.00 - 33
Henry James0.96 - 34
Benjamin Franklin0.96 - 35
Bede0.96 - 36
James Madison0.96 - 37
Origen0.95 - 38
Ho Chi Minh0.91 - 39
Charlemagne0.91 - 40
Jimmy Carter0.91 - 41
Thucydides0.87 - 42
Virginia Woolf0.87 - 43
Richard Nixon0.86 - 44
Prince George, Duke of Cumberland0.85 - 45
Suharto0.81 - 46
Winston Churchill0.81 - 47
Sophocles0.79 - 48
Livy0.78 - 49
William Henry0.76 - 50
Ramakrishna0.76 - 51
Mahatma Gandhi0.75 - 52
Solon0.75 - 53
Thomas Aquinas0.75 - 54
Indira Gandhi0.75 - 55
Henry Ford0.75 - 56
Jefferson Davis0.74 - 57
John Adams0.73 - 58
Julius Caesar0.73 - 59
Hadrian0.73 - 60
Aristophanes0.71 - 61
Nelson Mandela0.70 - 62
Andrew Jackson0.70 - 63
George Eliot0.70 - 64
Plotinus0.70 - 65
Jawaharlal Nehru0.70 - 66
Rajiv Gandhi0.69 - 67
Walt Whitman0.69 - 68
Jane Austen0.69 - 69
Ahab0.67 - 70
John Marshall0.67 - 71
Margaret Thatcher0.65 - 72
George Mason0.64 - 73
John Henry0.64 - 74
Pericles0.64 - 75
Hosea0.63 - 76
James Joyce0.63 - 77
Alexander the Great0.63 - 78
John Smith0.63 - 79
Malcolm X0.62 - 80
Frank Lloyd0.62 - 81
Sappho0.61 - 82
Xenophon0.60 - 83
Oscar Wilde0.60 - 84
Aeschylus0.59 - 85
Frank Lloyd Wright0.58 - 86
T. S. Eliot0.58 - 87
William Shakespeare0.58 - 88
Charles Dickens0.58 - 89
Pythagoras0.56 - 90
Lyndon B. Johnson0.56 - 91
John Wesley0.56 - 92
Hesiod0.56 - 93
Hippocrates0.56 - 94
William Morris0.55 - 95
Boethius0.53 - 96
Frederick Douglass0.53 - 97
John Dewey0.52
- 98
Pocahontas0.52
- 99
Joseph Smith0.52 - 100
John Major0.52
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.