Toby is the medieval English form of Tobias, which originated from Hebrew Toviyyah, meaning ‘Yahweh is good’. Tobias is particularly common in Central Europe and Scandinavia.
Toby is a masculine first name but has increasingly been given to girls in recent years.
The name Toby 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, Toby ranks 734. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Toby. In the entire USA, approximately 35,053 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Toby. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
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 four letters, the name Toby is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four 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 Toby 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 Toby, you can simply say:
Tiger
Orange
Butterfly
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Toby
Toby
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
T
O
B
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
O
B
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. Toby sounds like this:
