Talon: Meaning of Baby Name Talon

About the Name Talon

Talon takes its meaning directly from the English word for a bird of prey's curved claw — an image of precision, power, and wild grace. The word itself traces back through Old French talon to the Latin talus, meaning heel or ankle bone, the anatomical reference that gave the hooked structure its name. As a given name, Talon belongs to a broader American tradition of choosing vivid nature and predator vocabulary — names like Hunter, Falcon, and Arrow — that project strength and a certain untamed energy.

Talon first entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 2000 and reached its national peak of #426 in 2006. It has proven surprisingly durable: with a total of 9,752 top-1000 births, it has remained on the chart continuously, most recently ranking #958 in 2023 with 236 births. That long tail — still charting two decades after its debut — distinguishes Talon from many early-2000s novelty picks that vanished within a few years. The variant spelling Talyn offers parents a slightly softer visual alternative.

The name's staying power likely owes something to its clean two-syllable structure and to ongoing cultural enthusiasm for fierce, nature-inspired names for boys. It occupies a space between the purely invented and the grounded in real vocabulary, giving it a legitimacy that purely synthetic names lack. For parents who want something bold yet historically rooted in English, Talon delivers both the image and the sound in two crisp syllables. The variant Talyn is the one spelling alternative on record.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.

Quick Facts About Talon

5,642

English baby names in our dictionary

3,391

English male names

206

5-letter T-names in our dictionary

585

T-male names total

2000–2023

years of US SSA records (24 total)

9,752

total US births named Talon (all years)

US Popularity History (2000–2023)

📉 Falling fast: Talon dropped 204 places in the US boys ranking over the last 5 years (#754 in 2018 → #958 in 2023).

Annual US births named Talon by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2006 with 661 boys named Talon (boy rank #426 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2023, ranked #958 for boys (236 US births). That's 532 places below its 2006 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.

Where in the US Is Talon 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 Talon the strongest states are Hawaii, Idaho, Arkansas.

Strongest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Hawaii	#307	15
2	Idaho	#374	33
3	Arkansas	#443	33
4	Oklahoma	#455	99
5	Utah	#487	79
6	Kansas	#513	21
7	Nevada	#523	18
8	Kentucky	#547	67
9	Iowa	#553	26
10	Oregon	#571	35

Weakest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	California	#1,064	120
2	Georgia	#1,057	27
3	Texas	#977	71
4	Florida	#881	108
5	Missouri	#784	51
6	Virginia	#770	26
7	Michigan	#764	53
8	Ohio	#756	97
9	Tennessee	#742	74
10	Indiana	#732	55

Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Talon in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.

Looking for names like Talon?

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.

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Compare Talon to Other Popular Names

Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Talon against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).

Talon vs Liam 239,320 births since 2014

Talon vs Noah 230,181 births since 2014

Talon vs Oliver 164,076 births since 2014

Talon vs William 159,918 births since 2014

Talon vs James 157,850 births since 2014

Talon vs Elijah 153,351 births since 2014

Talon vs Benjamin 147,449 births since 2014

Talon vs Lucas 141,302 births since 2014

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