Thomas

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Thomas boys named Thomas

By the numbers

Total US births

2,367,087

Estimated living today

1.5 million

Median age today

57

Peak year

1952

Best rank

8th

Rank in 2025

34th

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

8,511 / 2,358,576

How old the living Thomases are

born that year still alive today

Of the 2,367,087 babies given the name since 1880, about 1.5 million are alive — 62 in every hundred. Roughly 125,000 of them are children and 529,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1968 and half after.

An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.

Where the name comes from

Origin Aramaic

from Latin Thōmās (as in the Vulgate), from Ancient Greek Θωμᾶς, the Biblical Greek transcription of Aramaic תאומא or תאמא (“twin”), the nickname of one of the Twelve Apostles.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Thomass

• Thomas Edison (1847–1931)American inventor and businessman
• Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)Founding Father, U.S. president from 1801 to 1809
• Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church
• Thomas Mann (1875–1955)German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate
• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)English philosopher
• Thomas Paine (1737–1809)American Founding Father, philosopher, and political activist
• Thomas More (1478–1535)English statesman, lawyer and philosopher
• Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher

People named Thomas with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Thomas is most common

• NY243,422
• PA184,416
• CA136,755
• IL134,326
• OH133,246
• MI106,122
• NJ95,205
• TX93,099
• MA83,355
• WI62,785

Relative to how many babies each state records, Thomas is most concentrated in Rhode Island (1.5×), Connecticut (1.5×), New Jersey (1.5×), the District of Columbia (1.5×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1952

The most popular boys’ names the year Thomas peaked:

• James
• Robert
• John
• Michael
• David
• William

All the names of 1952

Thomas elsewhere

Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.

Thomas: births by region

Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.

By canton, Thomas is most concentrated in Jura, where 0.55% of children were given it – 80 of them.

Thomas: rank by region

In 2025, Thomas was given 5 times or more in 3 regions of Belgium. It has come first somewhere in 8 different years.

In 2024, Thomas was among the 10 most common names in 1 region of Italy.

In 2025, Thomas was given 2 times or more in 3 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Thomas appears in the lists for Province of Walloon Brabant (64th), Province of Limburg (89th), Province of Hainaut (131st), Brussels-Capital Region (153rd), Province of East Flanders (179th), Province of Antwerp (181st) and Province of Flemish Brabant (218th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Italy after 10 names, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Thomas by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Thomas among the living

How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.

Where Thomas lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 3,124 men called Thomas were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 45 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 7 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Thor
• Thomasina
• Thornton
• Thompson
• Thora
• Thorin
• Thomasine
• Thom
• Thomasena

Thomas against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Thomas vs Thor
• Thomas vs Thomasina
• Thomas vs Thornton
• Thomas vs Thompson
• Thomas vs Thora
• Thomas vs Thorin

Compare Thomas with a name of your own