The name Terry has multiple origins. It is, for example, the English form of the French name Thierry, which is derived from Theodoric. This name developed from the Gothic Þiudareiks, meaning ‘ruler of the people’.
Terry is a first name for boys, occasionally also given to girls.
The name Terry 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, Terry ranks 674. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Terry. In total, there are currently 512,398 people – children, adults and seniors – named Terry living in the United States, which is approximately 0.15 % of the entire population.
#22 - this is the highest position Terry has ever reached. Most names never manage to reach such high popularity in even one of the 143 years of records.The last time Terry reached this top position was in the last century, in 1958, when 20,329 newborn boys were named Terry. But as our statistics show, Terry has not always been a popular name: in some years of records, lastly in the year 1881, it was either not given to newborns at all or less than 5 times (a name is only included in the official statistics if it is given at least 5 times in a year). Even today it's not at the peak of its popularity, nevertheless Terry is still the first choice of some parents every year as the most beautiful first name for their newborn sons.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Terry was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, 237 newborns were given the name Terry, making them rank #894. Although the name Terry was more popular in the last century than it is today, it is still common and for some parents it is the name of choice for their sons. So the chances of an encounter with a young Terry are still there in our contemporary times.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Terry is one of them. However, Terry is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Tennessee seem to particularly fancy this name – the 17,208 men called Terry who live here are 0,502% of all male residents and push their name up to #38 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Tennessee. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 512,398 people with the name Terry. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Terry on position 76 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 T is a particularly popular initial letter for boys’ names. That’s because 6.3% 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 Terry 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.
With 6.3% of all boys' names that begin with the letter T, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average. And Thomas is the boys’ name starting with T, which is the most common of all.
If your name is Terry 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 Terry, you can simply say:
Tiger
Elephant
Rocket
Rocket
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Terry
Terry
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
T
E
R
R
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.
T
E
R
R
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. Terry sounds like this:
