The name Keith comes from a Scottish surname that was originally derived from the name of a place, possibly based on the Celtic ‘kayto’ meaning ‘wood’. The surname Wood is the English equivalent to Keith.
Keith is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Keith 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, Keith ranks 456. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 4 were named Keith. In total, there are currently 431,364 people – children, adults and seniors – named Keith living in the United States, which is approximately 0.13 % of the entire population.
The name Keith comes from a Scottish surname that was originally derived from the name of a place, possibly based on the Celtic ‘kayto’ meaning ‘wood’. The surname Wood is the English equivalent to Keith.
Keith has been a ... popular given name since the mid-19th century, and had its heyday in the 1970s.
#32 - this is the highest position Keith has ever reached. Most names never manage to reach such high popularity in even one of the 143 years of records.The last time Keith reached this top position was in the last century, in 1966, when 11,674 newborn boys were named Keith. But as our statistics show, Keith has not always been a popular name: in some years of records, lastly in the year 1891, it was either not given to newborns at all or less than 5 times (a name is only included in the official statistics if it is given at least 5 times in a year). Even today it's not at the peak of its popularity, nevertheless Keith is still the first choice of some parents every year as the most beautiful first name for their newborn sons.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Keith was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, 381 newborns were given the name Keith, making them rank #651. Although the name Keith was more popular in the last century than it is today, it is still common and for some parents it is the name of choice for their sons. So the chances of an encounter with a young Keith are still there in our contemporary times.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Keith is one of them. However, Keith is not equally widespread in all states, but people in North Dakota seem to particularly fancy this name – the 2,401 men called Keith who live here are 0,421% of all male residents and push their name up to #52 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in North Dakota. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 431,364 people with the name Keith. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Keith on position 73 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter K is a real popular first letter for boys’ names. That’s because 7.9% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters J, A and D are more common for boys' names.
With five letters, the name Keith is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five 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.
That means that if 7.9% of all boys' names start with a K, this initial letter occurs more than twice as often as all 26 letters on average. Interesting detail: of all the boys’ names that begin with a K, Kenneth is the most common.
If your name is Keith 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 Keith, you can simply say:
Koala
Elephant
Igloo
Tiger
Hat
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Keith
Keith
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
E
I
T
H
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.
K
E
I
T
H
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. Keith sounds like this:
