Sue
- Pronunciation
- [Sue]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Lily
- Origin
- Hebrew
About the Name Sue
Sue is a short form of Susan or Susanna, names derived from the Hebrew shoshannah, meaning "lily" — a flower with deep symbolic resonance in the ancient Near East and a recurring image in biblical poetry. Sue distills its fuller source into the most compact and immediate possible form: a single syllable, warm and unadorned. That spareness was part of its appeal in the mid-twentieth century, when short names for women — Pat, Jo, Kay, Sue — carried a sense of modern efficiency and friendly accessibility.
Sue first entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 1939 and climbed to its peak rank of #61 in 1946, at the crest of postwar baby-boom naming. It remained in the top-1000 through 1950, when it ranked #100 with 3,503 births, accumulating 47,069 top-1000 births across its tracked presence. Its window of peak popularity — roughly one decade — marks it as a name that captured a very specific mid-century American moment without lingering.
Today Sue reads as a quintessential 1940s name: self-assured, plain-spoken, and unladen by ornamentation. Parents who choose it now are reaching for a single-syllable classic that feels genuinely vintage rather than reconstructed, with a simplicity that stands in deliberate contrast to the longer and more elaborate feminine names currently in fashion. Its brevity is its character.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Sue
US Popularity History (1939–1950)
Annual US births named Sue by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1947 with 5,306 girls named Sue (girl rank #69 that year).
Where it stands today: in 1950, ranked #100 for girls (3,503 US births). That's 31 places below its 1947 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 Sue Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 1956–1965 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Sue the strongest states are Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota.
Strongest girls-name states
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 1956–1965. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Sue in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Looking for names like Sue?
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 Sue to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Sue against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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