Roy is the anglicized form of Ruadh, a medieval Gaelic nickname meaning ‘red’. It was given to someone with red hair. Around 1900, Roy was very popular in the U.S..
Roy is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Roy 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, Roy ranks 522. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 3 were named Roy. In total, there are currently 377,326 people – children, adults and seniors – named Roy living in the United States, which is approximately 0.11 % of the entire population.
Roy is the anglicized form of Ruadh, a medieval Gaelic nickname meaning ‘red’. It was given to someone with red hair. Around 1900, Roy was very popular in the U.S..
Because of the... similarity to the French word 'roi' for 'king', Roy is often associated with this meaning.
Roy is the epitome of endurance. Every year since first names have been registered in the United States, parents have come up with the idea of naming their son Roy. This means that several boys named Roy have witnessed historic events such as the first Nobel Prize ceremony, the moon landing, the release of the first cell phone, or the turn of the millennium. The first name Roy has reached its highest rank of 18 numerous times, but that was long ago before the beginning of the last century, last time in 1899. Nevertheless, the name has been in the top 100 repeatedly. This makes Roy one of the most popular names of all time.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Roy was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Roy will be Roy. Like every other year, there have been newborns named Roy in 2022 – in fact 511 to be precise, confirming Roy is still a popular first name. In this most recent year for which US-wide statistics are available, the name ranked #539 among all boys‘ names. For comparison, the least popular year for this first name was 2020, when only 483 baby boys were named Roy.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Roy is one of them. However, Roy is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Arkansas seem to particularly fancy this name – the 9,700 men called Roy who live here are 0,556% of all male residents and push their name up to #30 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Arkansas. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 377,326 people with the name Roy. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Roy on position 84 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 R is quite common as an initial letter for boys’ names. To be precise, 5.2% of all 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 only three letters, the name Roy 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.
Therefore: As 5.2% of all boys' names start with R, this initial letter occurs much more often than all 26 letters on average. And maybe interesting to know: of all the names that begin with an R, Robert is the most common.
If your name is Roy 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 Roy, you can simply say:
Rocket
Orange
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Roy
Roy
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
R
O
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.
R
O
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. Roy sounds like this:
