Sam is a Persian name meaning ‘fire’. It is used since at least the 10th century. In the English-speaking world, it is usually a short form of names like Samuel, Samson or Samantha, with different meanings and origins.
Sam is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Sam 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, Sam ranks 550. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 3 were named Sam. In the entire USA, approximately 105,952 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Sam. That is 0.03 % of all living Americans.
Sam is a Persian name meaning ‘fire’. It is used since at least the 10th century. In the English-speaking world, it is usually a short form of names like Samuel, Samson or Samantha, with different meanings and origins.
As a given name,... Sam was popular until 1910. Since then, its popularity has been low.
Sam 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 Sam. This means that several boys named Sam 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 Sam has reached its highest rank of 30 numerous times, but that was long ago before the beginning of the last century, last time in 1882. Nevertheless, the name has been in the top 100 repeatedly. This makes Sam one of the most popular names of all time.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Sam was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Sam will be Sam. Like every other year, there have been newborns named Sam in 2022 – in fact 432 to be precise, confirming Sam is still a popular first name. In this most recent year for which US-wide statistics are available, the name ranked #598 among all boys‘ names. For comparison, the least popular year for this first name was 2020, when only 414 baby boys were named Sam.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Sam is one of them. However, Sam is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Mississippi seem to particularly fancy this name – the 4,818 men called Sam who live here are 0,241% of all male residents and push their name up to #87 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Mississippi. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 105,952 people with the name Sam. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Sam on position 274 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 S is a quite popular first letter for boys’ names. Because: 5.9% 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, A and D.
With only three letters, the name Sam 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.
This means that with 5.9% of all boys' names that begin with an S, this first letter is much more common than all 26 letters on average - and the most popular one of all the boys’ names starting with S is Steven.
If your name is Sam 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 Sam, you can simply say:
Sun
Apple
Mouse
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Sam
Sam
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
S
A
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.
S
A
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. Sam sounds like this:
