Otis
- Pronunciation
- [O-tis]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Keen Of Hearing
- Origin
- Greek
About the Name Otis
Otis traces to the ancient Greek element ous (genitive otos), carrying the meaning "keen of hearing" — a quality the Greeks associated with attentiveness and wisdom. The name passed into use across Northern Europe as a given name and surname, gaining particular traction in English-speaking countries through the nineteenth century, when it was bolstered by the fame of Elisha Graves Otis, the American inventor whose surname share gave the name added industrial-age resonance in the popular imagination, though the name itself stands independently of any single bearer.
The name carries the honest, two-syllable directness that has made short Anglo-Saxon-inflected names perennially attractive to parents seeking something rooted yet uncommon. It belongs to the same broad family of brisk, o-initial masculine names — Orson, Olin, Otto — that feel simultaneously vintage and current, equally at home on a nineteenth-century frontier and a twenty-first-century birth certificate.
Otis appears in the US Social Security top-1000 from 1899, when it also recorded its best-ever rank of #94 that same year. After a long mid-century dormancy outside the charts, the name has staged a notable modern comeback, climbing to #615 in 2022, #654 in 2023, and rising further to #730 in 2024 with 358 births. The rebound follows the broader vintage-name revival that has lifted similarly styled names back into mainstream use. No recorded spelling variants appear in the SSA data for this name.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Otis
US Popularity History (1899–2025)
Annual US births named Otis by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2022 with 455 boys named Otis (boy rank #615 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #652 for boys (422 US births). That's 37 places below its 2022 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 Otis 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 Otis the strongest states are Vermont, Montana, Oregon.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vermont | #99 | 25 |
| 2 | Montana | #252 | 15 |
| 3 | Oregon | #380 | 99 |
| 4 | Massachusetts | #397 | 119 |
| 5 | Wisconsin | #408 | 124 |
| 6 | Minnesota | #429 | 131 |
| 7 | Colorado | #462 | 124 |
| 8 | Washington | #467 | 152 |
| 9 | Connecticut | #469 | 18 |
| 10 | Utah | #537 | 49 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | #940 | 148 |
| 2 | Florida | #885 | 63 |
| 3 | New Jersey | #857 | 37 |
| 4 | Georgia | #855 | 42 |
| 5 | Louisiana | #823 | 29 |
| 6 | Alabama | #809 | 16 |
| 7 | Arizona | #792 | 37 |
| 8 | Maryland | #788 | 24 |
| 9 | Pennsylvania | #777 | 75 |
| 10 | Virginia | #764 | 54 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Otis in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Looking for names like Otis?
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 Otis to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Otis 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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