The name Clay comes from an English surname for someone who worked with clay or lived near a clay pit. The name is related to the surname Clayton.
Clay is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Clay isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all boys names, Clay ranks 653. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Clay. In the entire USA, approximately 33,390 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Clay. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Clay annualy. This means that there have been boys named Clay who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus men named Clay have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Clay even more than any other time: in 1960, it holds its present record at rank #248 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Clay was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Clay has never been ranked higher than #248. In 2022, he rivaled the 583 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 450 boys named Clay were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Clay were born, there have been 433 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter C is a frequent initial letter for boys’ names. This is because 5.2% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D.
With four letters, the name Clay is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
With 5.2% of all boys' names that begin with a C, this first letter is thus much more common than the average of all letters. And which boys’ name beginning with C do you think is the most common in the US? The answer is... Charles.
If your name is Clay and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Clay, you can simply say:
Cat
Lion
Apple
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Clay
Clay
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
C
L
A
Y
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
C
L
A
Y
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Clay sounds like this:
