Tom is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Tom is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 boys have been named Tom. In the SmartGenius ranking, Tom is #1,791 on the list of most common boys names. In the entire USA, approximately 125,401 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Tom. That is 0.04 % of all living Americans.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Tom is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Tom for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Therefore, Tom is one of the 442 boys' names, that have been given to newborn sons every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Tom is a very special name that peaked in popularity over 100 years ago in the 19th century, ranking in the top 100 boys' names in our SmartGenius first name statistics: Placed at #39 Tom has never been more popular than back in 1880.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Tom was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
The name Tom may not be in the top rankings of the most popular boys’ names, but it is one of the few male given names, along with only 385 others, that can be found in every single state in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and from California to New York. Of course, the name occurs more frequently in some states than in others – and Tom is apparently especially popular in Montana. Although the name is not one of the top 100 most popular men’s names here either, one in 502 men in Montana is called Tom. In total, that’s 1,047 people who feel addressed when the name Tom is shouted loudly across Montana and who ensure that their name makes it to #129 in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common male names in this nice state. If you asked all people in the entire U.S. for their first name, you would hear Tom as the answer a total of 125,401 times. This places Tom at #245 in our SmartGenius statistics for the most popular male names in the whole of the USA. This is true for all currently living people across all states and age groups – the recent popularity of the name Tom as a baby name is, of course, a bit 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 only three letters, the name Tom 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.
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 Tom 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 Tom, you can simply say:
Tiger
Orange
Mouse
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Tom
Tom
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
T
O
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.
T
O
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. Tom sounds like this:
