Leo is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The first name Leo is one of the top 100 most popular boys names in the US – currently at #64 in our SmartGenius ranking. Over 1,000 babies each year are named Leo, accounting for approximately 0.30 % of all newborn boys. In the entire USA, approximately 219,866 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Leo. That is 0.07 % of all living Americans.
The name Leo is of Latin origin and means ‘lion’. It has been used for centuries, and is associated with the astrological sign of Leo, which is represented by the lion. The astrological sign as well as the name are associated with courage, strength, and leadership.
The astrological sign of Leo... was already worshipped by Ancient Egyptians because the constellation was present in the sky during the flooding of the Nile River. The flooding signified plentiful harvests for the upcoming year, and was interpreted as a gift from the earth.
Leo Monahan (1926 - 2013)
Monahan grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, where he started working at the daily newspaper The Boston Record. He made his name as a sports journalist, mainly traveling with and reporting on the ice hockey team Boston Bruins. He used a manual typewriter for his entire career.
Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)
Regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time, Leo Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times, and for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. The Russian wrote novels, short stories, plays, and essays. War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878) are two of his famous works.
Leo Ryan (1925 - 1978)
The American teacher and politician was a member of the Democratic Party. He served as a US representative for California from 1973 to his death in 1978. At age 53, he was assassinated during the so-called Jonestown massacre in Guyana in South America.
Leo Strauss (1899 - 1973)
Strauss was a German-American philosopher focusing on political philosophy. He received his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1921. In the 1930s, he emigrated to the USA. There, he mainly taught at the University of Chicago, and published fifteen books.
When you hear the name Leo, you might first think of people. But did you know that there are also places with the name Leo? Are you also called Leo? Maybe one day you will visit the places that are named just like you...
in the US state of West Virginia is called Leo. Named after a local girl, the town was inhabited from the 1880s to the 1930s.
you'll find the unincorporated community Saint Leo. It is located in Monongalia County in the north of the state.
is a sandstone petroglyph containing images of humans and animals as well as footprints. It is located near Leo, Ohio and believed to have been created between 1000 and 1650.
located in Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in Africa. It has more than 50,000 inhabitants and is close to the border with Ghana.
there are the Leo Islands, an island group inside the Coronation Gulf. The islands are unpopulated.
of the zodiac is named Leo. It is located in the Northern celestial hemisphere and consists of nine main stars.
If we dig really deep into our statistics, we find that there are very few boys' names that have been consistently popular for so long that they have been given to newborns in every single year since the beginning of our records in 1880. In fact, there are only 442 boys' names that appear in our statistics in every single year, and Leo is one of those very special classics. At the same time, Leo has never been more popular than it is in this century - in 2022 the name even made it to rank #23 of the most popular boys' names, easily landing in the top 100 of our SmartGenius first name statistics.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Leo was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
...because: In 2022, 8,282 boys were born and given the name Leo by their parents. That puts Leo at #23 on our list of most popular boys' names. It was much less popular in 1995 - only 451 parents chose this name for their newborn son and it ranked 454 on the popularity scale of all boys' names.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Leo is one of them. However, Leo is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Rhode Island seem to particularly fancy this name – the 2,265 men called Leo who live here are 0,360% of all male residents and push their name up to #64 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Rhode Island. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 219,866 people with the name Leo. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Leo on position 162 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 L is neither particularly common nor particularly rare as a first letter for boys' names: 4.1% of all common boys' names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters of boys' names are J and A, while X and U are the least common initials of boys' names.
With only three letters, the name Leo is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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.
Thus, it follows that with 4.1% of all boys' names starting with an L, this initial letter occurs about as often as all 26 letters on average. Nevertheless, there are boys' names with L that are quite common, the most common in the U.S. at present is Larry.
If your name is Leo 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 Leo, you can simply say:
Lion
Elephant
Orange
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Leo
Leo
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
L
E
O
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.
L
E
O
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. Leo sounds like this:
