The name Malcolm is the anglicized form of Scottish Gaelic Máel Coluim, which means ‘disciple of Saint Columba’. He lived in the 6th century and was an Irish missionary credited with spreading Christianity in what is today Scotland.
Malcolm is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Malcolm 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, Malcolm ranks 349. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 5 were named Malcolm. In the entire USA, approximately 60,805 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Malcolm. That is 0.02 % of all living Americans.
The name Malcolm is the anglicized form of Scottish Gaelic Máel Coluim, which means ‘disciple of Saint Columba’. He lived in the 6th century and was an Irish missionary credited with spreading Christianity in what is today Scotland.
Malcom is a very old... given name, that is in use since at least the 9th century.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Malcolm annualy. This means that there have been boys named Malcolm 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 Malcolm 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 Malcolm even more than any other time: in 1928, it holds its present record at rank #198 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Malcolm was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Malcolm has never been ranked higher than #198. In 2022, he rivaled the 271 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 1,211 boys named Malcolm were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Malcolm were born, there have been 1,495 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter M is a particularly popular initial letter for boys’ names – 6.2% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for boys’ names are J and A.
With seven letters, the name Malcolm has a typical length for first names in the US. In fact, 26% of all common first names consist of exactly seven letters. 52% of all first names are shorter, while 22% have eight letters or more. 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 with 6.2% of all boys' names that begin with an M, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average. If you are now wondering which boys’ name with M is the most common... the answer is Michael.
If your name is Malcolm 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 Malcolm, you can simply say:
Mouse
Apple
Lion
Cat
Orange
Lion
Mouse
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Malcolm
Malcolm
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
A
L
C
O
L
M
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.
M
A
L
C
O
L
M
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. Malcolm sounds like this:
