Toby
About 43,233 American babies have been named Toby since 1882, most of them around 1975. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 977th. About 37,000 Tobys are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 45.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Toby boys named Toby
Girls and boys called Toby
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Toby crossed from girls to boys in 1946, and has stayed there for 80 of the years counted since. At its furthest it was 94% boys, and in 2025 it was 70%.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 113 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 43,233
- Estimated living today
- 37,000
- Median age today
- 45
- Peak year
- 1975
- Best rank
- 190th
- Rank in 2025
- 977th
- First recorded
- 1882
- Girls / boys
- 8,387 / 34,846
How old the living Tobys are
born that year still alive today
Of the 43,233 babies given the name since 1882, about 37,000 are alive — 84 in every hundred. Roughly 6,700 of them are children and 4,300 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1980 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 Hebrew
The Middle English vernacular form of Tobias.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Tobys
- Toby Alderweireld (born 1989)Belgian association football player
- Toby Jones (born 1966)British actor
- Toby Fox (born 1991)American video game designer and composer
- Toby Kebbell (born 1982)British actor
- Toby Keith (1961–2024)American country music singer and actor
- Toby Stephens (born 1969)British actor
- Toby Regbo (born 1991)English actor
- Toby Huss (born 1966)American actor
People named Toby with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Toby is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Toby is most concentrated in New Mexico (2.9×), Colorado (2.0×), Oklahoma (1.9×), Louisiana (1.8×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1975
The most popular boys’ names the year Toby peaked:
Toby elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Toby | 33,082 | 52nd |
| New Zealand boys | Toby | 1,879 | 43rd |
| Scotland boys | Toby | 796 | 150th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Toby | 488 | 90th |
| Ireland boys | Toby | 447 | 173rd |
| England and Wales girls | Toby | 230 | 1,703rd |
| Belgium boys | Toby | 228 | 520th |
| France boys | Toby | 50 | 4,456th |
| Poland boys | Toby | 11 birth registrations | 474th |
| Belgium girls | Toby | 5 | 1,402nd |
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.
Toby: rank by region
In 2021, Toby was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Toby | 698 | 7 |
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Toby 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.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Toby | 24 | 32 |
| Finland girls | Toby | — | 5 |
A count of people on a register – 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.
Related names
Toby against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.