Kye: Meaning of Baby Name Kye

About the Name Kye

Kye is a crisp, single-syllable Irish name connected to a place-name sense of "the narrows," and associated as well with a wood or a church. Its brevity is its defining signature: one bright, open sound that lands cleanly and is all but impossible to mispronounce. Names of this kind, rooted in landscape and place, carry a quiet sense of belonging to a particular spot of ground — a hillside, a stretch of water, a sheltering grove.

That minimalist appeal fits squarely within the modern taste for short, punchy boys' names that feel both fresh and entirely unfussy. Kye reads as easy and confident, a name that needs no nickname because it is already as compact as a name can be. It pairs naturally with longer surnames and middle names, and it sits comfortably alongside the wave of brief, vowel-light names that have come into fashion for boys in recent years, reading as effortlessly current.

As a boys' name, Kye first entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 2015 and reached its peak the very next year, in 2016, at #693. It remained in the rankings through 2023, when it stood at #941, and across its tracked years it accounted for 2,536 births among the top-1000. Its strength lies in that streamlined simplicity — a complete, self-contained name delivered in a single breath, with nothing to spare and nothing missing.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.

Quick Facts About Kye

1,167

Irish baby names in our dictionary

705

Irish male names

16

3-letter K-names in our dictionary

476

K-male names total

2015–2023

years of US SSA records (9 total)

2,536

total US births named Kye (all years)

US Popularity History (2015–2023)

📉 Falling fast: Kye dropped 181 places in the US boys ranking over the last 5 years (#760 in 2018 → #941 in 2023).

Annual US births named Kye by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2016 with 356 boys named Kye (boy rank #693 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2023, ranked #941 for boys (240 US births). That's 248 places below its 2016 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.

Where in the US Is Kye 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 Kye the strongest states are Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas.

Strongest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Louisiana	#450	111
2	Arkansas	#462	37
3	Kansas	#487	29
4	Mississippi	#489	35
5	Kentucky	#493	55
6	Oklahoma	#577	76
7	Missouri	#587	76
8	Iowa	#587	21
9	Alabama	#594	65
10	Wisconsin	#646	52

Weakest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Florida	#958	100
2	Illinois	#904	66
3	Michigan	#901	41
4	Pennsylvania	#850	55
5	Washington	#848	27
6	Arizona	#815	20
7	Virginia	#792	58
8	Texas	#785	300
9	Indiana	#730	69
10	Ohio	#729	113

Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Kye in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.

Looking for names like Kye?

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.

See all names like Kye →

Compare Kye to Other Popular Names

Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Kye against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).

Kye vs Liam 239,320 births since 2014

Kye vs Noah 230,181 births since 2014

Kye vs Oliver 164,076 births since 2014

Kye vs William 159,918 births since 2014

Kye vs James 157,850 births since 2014

Kye vs Elijah 153,351 births since 2014

Kye vs Benjamin 147,449 births since 2014

Kye vs Lucas 141,302 births since 2014

Compare to a different name →