Leroy
- Pronunciation
- [Le-roy]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Regal
- Origin
- French
About the Name Leroy
Leroy comes from the Old French le roi, meaning "the king," carrying the same regal root as its shorter cousin Roy. Brought to England with the Norman Conquest and later transplanted to America, it evolved from a surname used by families who held royal connections or service roles, eventually becoming a given name in the nineteenth century as part of the broader Victorian fashion for occupational and status surnames used as first names. The name shares its French-royal root with Roy and with the related Ray, and its full two-syllable form gives it a stateliness that the shorter variants lack.
Leroy first appeared in the US Social Security top-1000 in 1881 and reached its peak in 1907 at rank #50. Over its long run the name accumulated nearly 140,000 top-1000 births — a substantial total reflecting genuine popularity across multiple generations. Remarkably, Leroy has maintained a presence in the SSA top-1000 into the modern era, ranking #862 as recently as 2024 with 278 births that year, suggesting a quiet contemporary revival.
The name has a vintage warmth and confident authority that contemporary parents have rediscovered as part of a broader interest in old-fashioned American names with genuine historical roots. Recorded variants and related forms include Elroy, Lee, Leigh, and Roy — each capturing a different facet of the same regal French heritage.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Leroy
US Popularity History (1881–2025)
Annual US births named Leroy by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1924 with 3,922 boys named Leroy (boy rank #53 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #888 for boys (269 US births). That's 835 places below its 1924 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 Leroy 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 Leroy the strongest states are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa.
Strongest boys-name states
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Leroy in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Looking for names like Leroy?
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 Leroy to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Leroy against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).