Kingston
- Pronunciation
- [Kin-gston]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- From The King's Village Or Estate King's Field. King Is One Of Several Titles Occasionally Used As Given Names.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Kingston
Kingston is an English place-name and surname meaning literally "the king's town" — from Old English cyning (king) plus tūn (town, settlement). Several English towns bear the name, most notably Kingston upon Thames (the historical site of Anglo-Saxon coronations, where seven 10th-century English kings were crowned) and Kingston upon Hull (modern Hull). The surname appears in English records continuously since at least the 12th century.
The name's transition from place-name to American first name is essentially a 21st-century phenomenon, accelerated by celebrity adoption. The single most influential celebrity bearer is Kingston Rossdale (born 2006, son of Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale), whose high-visibility childhood gave the name a contemporary urban-cool register. Other notable bearers as a place-name include Kingston, Jamaica — the capital city, whose cultural register through reggae music and Jamaican sport gives Kingston an additional Caribbean-cool tonal layer.
Kingston climbed from outside the US top 1000 in 1995 to the top 100 boys' rank by 2010 and has held that range since. The name's appeal is layered: the in-built royal-American register from the literal meaning, the Jamaican-Caribbean cultural connotations, and the surname-style sophistication of three syllables with hard consonants. The name reads as both aspirational and modern. Common nicknames King (a related but distinct name), Kingsley (the longer formal extension), Kins, and the rare Tonny each carry distinct registers. There are no significant international variants since the name's first-name use is essentially modern American.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Kingston
US Popularity History (2006–2025)
Annual US births named Kingston by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2021 with 3,404 boys named Kingston (boy rank #112 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #204 for boys (1,725 US births). That's 92 places below its 2021 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Kingston Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Kingston the strongest states are Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mississippi | #13 | 903 |
| 2 | South Carolina | #29 | 1,110 |
| 3 | Louisiana | #34 | 997 |
| 4 | Alabama | #44 | 934 |
| 5 | Arkansas | #46 | 557 |
| 6 | Tennessee | #60 | 1,249 |
| 7 | Georgia | #60 | 1,719 |
| 8 | Kentucky | #71 | 660 |
| 9 | Hawaii | #83 | 136 |
| 10 | West Virginia | #95 | 211 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Connecticut | #363 | 80 |
| 2 | New Jersey | #355 | 215 |
| 3 | New York | #305 | 573 |
| 4 | Massachusetts | #274 | 204 |
| 5 | Colorado | #259 | 248 |
| 6 | New Mexico | #251 | 84 |
| 7 | California | #236 | 1,741 |
| 8 | Pennsylvania | #233 | 498 |
| 9 | Idaho | #230 | 101 |
| 10 | New Hampshire | #224 | 24 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Kingston in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Looking for names like Kingston?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Kingston to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Kingston against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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