Silas is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Silas 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, Silas ranks 114. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 20 were named Silas. In the entire USA, approximately 55,786 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Silas. That is 0.02 % of all living Americans.
There are two possibilities for the meaning of the given name Silas. In any case, the name is of biblical origin. It goes back either to the name Saul, according to which it means ‘the requested one’, or to the name Silvan. The origin of this in turn lies with the ancient Roman forest god ‘Silvanus’ from the Latin ‘silva’ for ‘forest’.
In rare cases,... Silas is also a surname. It is most likely to be found in English, Danish, Dutch and German.
Silas Weir Mitchell (*1969)
The American actor is best known for his portrayal of Charles "Haywire" Patoshik in the Fox television series Prison Break (2005–2007) as well as his role of Donny Jones in "My Name Is Earl" (2005 – 2009). He had numerous appearances in several different tv-series.
Silas House (*1971)
The American writer, journalist and environmental activist is best known to most for his novel "Southernmost" (2018) as it earned him the Weatherford Award for Best Novel and the Judy Gaines Young Award. In his fiction, he focuses on the natural world, working class characters and the plight of the rural space.
Silas Timberlake (*2015)
Superstar Justin Timberlake and actress and modell Jessica Biel named their first-born son Silas Randall Timberlake.
Silas Mvumpa (*1998)
Silas Mvumpa is a professional soccer player. He was very successful in his home country DR Congo and played for the national team. Besides, he played as a forward for the German Bundesliga club "VfB".
When you hear the name Silas, you might first think of people. But did you know that there are also places with the name Silas? Are you also called Silas? Maybe one day you will visit the places that are named just like you...
Silas is a town in Choctaw County, Alabama with a population of 377. In 2021, it made the news because it was struck by a tornado.
SILAS is the abbreviation for the non-profit international organisation 'Society for Irish Latin American Studies'. It was founded in 2003 to study Ireland's role in Latin America.
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 Silas is one of those very special classics. At the same time, Silas has never been more popular than it is in this century - in 2022 the name even made it to rank #89 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 Silas was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
...because: In 2022, 4,016 boys were born and given the name Silas by their parents. That puts Silas at #89 on our list of most popular boys' names. It was much less popular in 1967 - only 52 parents chose this name for their newborn son and it ranked 897 on the popularity scale of all boys' names.
Everyone knows him, everyone loves him and still he’s different from the mainstream: Silas occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the nearly 50,000 different male first names that occur in the USA, only 386 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Silas is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Silas is not one of those names that everyone encounters in his neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, captures attention and is something special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 55,786 men and boys of all generations bear the name Silas – that is one in 2,992. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Alaska, where one in 400 men and boys is called Silas, while it is particularly rare in New Jersey, where you have to ask an average of 9,924 men for their name to get Silas as an answer once.
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 five letters, the name Silas 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.
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 Silas 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 Silas, you can simply say:
Sun
Igloo
Lion
Apple
Sun
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Silas
Silas
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
S
I
L
A
S
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
I
L
A
S
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. Silas sounds like this:
