Sebastian
- Pronunciation
- [Se-bas-ti-an]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Not recorded
- Origin
- Greek
Sebastian is a name traditionally given to a boy of Greek origin. Our sources do not preserve a single agreed-upon literal translation for this particular name, so we list its meaning as unrecorded rather than guess at one. Browse more Greek baby names or search the full library by meaning.
About the Name Sebastian
Sebastian descends from the Latin Sebastianus, originally meaning "from Sebaste" — Sebaste being an ancient Greek city (now Sivas, Turkey) whose name in turn came from the Greek sebastos meaning "venerable" or "revered" (the same root used as a Greek translation for the Roman imperial title Augustus). The name's Christian uptake is anchored by Saint Sebastian (d. 288), a Roman soldier and Christian martyr whose iconic depiction — bound to a tree, shot through with arrows — became one of the most widely reproduced subjects in Renaissance and Baroque painting, by Mantegna, Botticelli, El Greco, and many others.
The name has a long and uneven European history: standard in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Eastern European Christian traditions, but conspicuously rare in English-speaking countries until the 20th century. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), the German composer, gave the name its highest cultural register; later, Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca (with its dead title character's brother Sebastian) and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) seeded the name in mid-century English literature.
Sebastian's American surge is a 21st-century phenomenon, climbing from outside the US top 100 in the early 2000s to the top 15 by 2020 — part of the same Latinate-revival current that lifted Mateo, Lucas, and Sebastian's frequent companion name Leonardo. The name's appeal is its layered cosmopolitanism: classical, multi-cultural, instantly recognizable in nearly every European language without translation. Common nicknames Bas, Baz, and Seb each carry their own register; the rarer Sebby is warmer. International forms include Sébastien (French), Sebastián (Spanish), Sebastiano (Italian), and Sebastião (Portuguese).
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Sebastian
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Sebastian by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2016 with 10,308 boys named Sebastian (boy rank #23 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #16 for boys (8,605 US births). That's 7 places above its earlier 2016 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 Sebastian 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 Sebastian the strongest states are California, Texas, Nevada.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | #4 | 19,038 |
| 2 | Texas | #4 | 14,069 |
| 3 | Nevada | #5 | 1,213 |
| 4 | Arizona | #5 | 2,837 |
| 5 | New Mexico | #8 | 648 |
| 6 | Florida | #12 | 6,230 |
| 7 | Illinois | #16 | 3,481 |
| 8 | Colorado | #19 | 1,518 |
| 9 | Oregon | #23 | 939 |
| 10 | New Jersey | #23 | 2,411 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | South Dakota | #129 | 104 |
| 2 | Mississippi | #123 | 268 |
| 3 | North Dakota | #121 | 115 |
| 4 | West Virginia | #116 | 185 |
| 5 | Maine | #114 | 115 |
| 6 | New Hampshire | #113 | 126 |
| 7 | Montana | #102 | 115 |
| 8 | Alabama | #92 | 560 |
| 9 | Ohio | #90 | 1,388 |
| 10 | Hawaii | #85 | 128 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Sebastian in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Famous People Named Sebastian
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Sebastian.
- Sebastian Pinera was Chile's thirty-sixth president, Sebastian Pinera, a businessman and politician.
Looking for names like Sebastian?
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 Sebastian to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Sebastian 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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