This is a list of drowning victims, either real or fictional characters in chronological order. The reasons for drowning are diverse and range from suicide, to accidents or murders.

• Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of the mathematician Pythagoras, drowned by his master for the imprudence of discovering irrational numbers
• Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII of Egypt, drowned in the Nile in January 13 47 BC
• Antinous (born circa 111), lover of Roman Emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile in 130; the grieving emperor commissioned hundreds of statues of the youth and spread them around the Empire
• Li Po, Chinese poet, in 762
• Giselberg, Duke of Lotharingia , drowned on October 2 939 in the Rhine, near Mainz
• William Adelin (born 1103) and his half sister Matilda FitzEdith, countess of Perches (born circa 1090), sons of king Henry I of England, drowned in the Channel on November 25 1120 in the White Ship wreck
• Fierdrich I Barbarrossa, duke of Swabia and Holy Roman Emperor, drowned in the Göks River (Cilicia) on June 6 1190 during the Third Crusade, leaving an unstable alliance between Richard I of England and Philip II of France
• King Magnus II of Sweden and Norway, 1316 – 1374
• Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, Constable of the Tower of London, 1430 – 1475
• George, Duke of Clarence (born 1449), executed for treason against his brother king Edward IV of England on 1478, by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine; or so the legend says, because modern assessments favour the traditional decapitation instead
• Felix Manz, co-founder of the Swiss Anabaptists , was drowned in 1527 in the Limmat River in Zürich by the Zürich Reformed state church
• John William Friso of Orange-Nassau, stadholder of the Low Countries, in 1711
• Peter Artedi, a disciple of Linnaeus, considered the father of Icthyology , fell by accident in a channel of Amsterdam in 1735
• Ludwig II of Bavaria, 1845 – June 13 1886
• Percy Shelley, while sailing off Livorno
• Adolphe Heliére , French cyclist. Drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean Sea during a rest day of the Tour de France, 1910.
• Grigori Rasputin (died 1916), Russian mystic and Imperial adviser; the aristocratic faction tried to kill him using several methods, eventually drowning on the Neva River proved to be the most efficient
• Enrique Granados, drowned after jumping out of a lifeboat to rescue his wife, following the torpedoing of their ship by the German navy during World War I, in 1916.
• Virginia Woolf (born 1882), British writer, committed suicide on May 28 1941
• Albert Ayler, jazz musician, suspected suicide
• Josef Mengele (born 1911), war criminal and leader of the Nazi human experimentation program, drowned while swimming in an Argentinian beach in 1979
• Natalie Wood (born 1938), actress, drowned in a yacht accident in 1981; the accident raised several suspicions and murder was considered
• Dennis Wilson, one of the members of the Beach Boys, in 1983
• Robert Maxwell, newpaper magnate, disappeared from his yacht under mysterious circumstances in 1991, body later recovered off the coast of Tenerife
• Tom Mees, longtime sportscaster for ESPN, drowned while trying to rescue his 4 year old daughter in a neighboor's swimming pool, in 1996
• Jeff Buckley (born 1966), drowned in the Mississippi River in 1997

Fictional and mythological characters

• Aegeus, father of the hero Theseus, committed suicide by jumping into the sea for believing his son dead; the sea was named after him and today is known by Aegean Sea
• Jason, the living dead, masked serial killer of the Friday the 13th movies, was originally a boy who drowned in a summer camp
• Primula Brandybuck and Drogo Baggins, the parents of Tolkien's character Frodo Baggins of the Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Ophelia in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet
• Rebecca, central character of the eponymous Alfred Hitchcock movie and Daphne Du Maurier novel, drowned while trying to anchor her yacht in a bay
• Adam and Barbara Maitland, the main characters in the movie Beetlejuice, drowned when they crashed their car off a covered bridge.

See also

• Filicide, most common method is drowning
• List of shipwrecks
• Lists of people by cause of death
• Burial at sea