Lucas
- Pronunciation
- [Lu-cas]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Light
- Origin
- Gaelic
About the Name Lucas
Lucas is the Latin form of Greek Loukas, traditionally interpreted as "man from Lucania" (a region of southern Italy) but also etymologically connected to Greek leukos (light, bright). The two interpretations have lived in parallel for two thousand years: the geographical reading anchors the name to a specific place, while the "light" reading aligns it with the Christian symbolic register of illumination and revelation.
The name's New Testament prominence comes from Saint Luke the Evangelist (1st century CE), traditionally credited with authoring the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. Christian tradition holds Luke as a Greek physician and companion of the apostle Paul, and his iconographic emblem — the winged ox — became one of the four standard symbols of the Gospels. Throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe, Luke (and its Latinate Lucas) remained a steady but secondary Christian name, with notable bearers including Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder.
The modern American boom is partly cultural — the rise of Star Wars (created by George Lucas, with the protagonist Luke Skywalker) seeded the English shorter form Luke heavily in the 1980s, while the longer Lucas absorbed the lift through the 2000s — and partly part of the broader Latinate-name resurgence (Mateo, Sebastian, Luca). Lucas entered the US top 10 boys' names by the late 2010s. Common nicknames are Luke (now itself widely used as an independent name) and the diminutive Luc; international forms include Luc (French), Luca (Italian), Lucas (Spanish/Portuguese, identical), and Loukas (Greek).
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Lucas
US Popularity History (1980–2025)
Annual US births named Lucas by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2017 with 13,029 boys named Lucas (boy rank #11 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #10 for boys (10,219 US births). That's 1 places above its earlier 2017 peak — the name is more popular now than it has ever been.
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 Lucas 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 Lucas the strongest states are Florida, New York, New Jersey.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida | #3 | 8,933 |
| 2 | New York | #4 | 8,253 |
| 3 | New Jersey | #4 | 3,983 |
| 4 | Maryland | #6 | 2,113 |
| 5 | Connecticut | #6 | 1,403 |
| 6 | Rhode Island | #7 | 431 |
| 7 | Massachusetts | #7 | 2,879 |
| 8 | Virginia | #8 | 3,125 |
| 9 | Pennsylvania | #8 | 4,183 |
| 10 | New Hampshire | #9 | 538 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | North Dakota | #50 | 197 |
| 2 | Mississippi | #48 | 514 |
| 3 | Alabama | #33 | 1,049 |
| 4 | Arkansas | #32 | 656 |
| 5 | South Dakota | #31 | 240 |
| 6 | Louisiana | #30 | 999 |
| 7 | Nebraska | #28 | 511 |
| 8 | Montana | #28 | 241 |
| 9 | Arizona | #28 | 1,681 |
| 10 | West Virginia | #27 | 465 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Lucas in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lukas | Bringer Of Light. Variant Of Lucas. | Male | English |
Looking for names like Lucas?
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 Lucas to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Lucas 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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