Wyatt: Meaning of Baby Name Wyatt

About the Name Wyatt

Wyatt descends from the medieval English Wiot or Wigot, ultimately from the Old English wig (war, battle) plus a hard-to-trace second element — possibly heard (brave) yielding the gloss "brave in war." The name was first a personal name, then a surname, and later returned to first-name use in the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in the United States.

The name's single most influential bearer is American Old West lawman Wyatt Earp (1848–1929), the most famous figure of the 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Earp's mythologized image — sheriff, gambler, frontier-justice icon — anchored Wyatt in 20th-century American Western mythology through dozens of films and books, including the 1957 film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and the 1993 Tombstone with Kurt Russell. Earlier, the 16th-century English diplomat and poet Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503–1542) introduced the sonnet form into English literature.

The contemporary American boom is mostly tied to the surname-as-given-name trend of the 1990s and 2000s, with the Earp association giving Wyatt a particularly strong frontier/Western-American flavor. The name climbed from outside the US top 200 in 1990 to the top 30 by 2014 and has remained there. The appeal is its compact strength and Americana texture: two syllables, hard consonants, vintage frontier register without feeling old-fashioned. Common nicknames are scarce — Wy, Wyatt itself is already short — and there are no significant international variants since the name's modern use is primarily English-American.

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

Quick Facts About Wyatt

1,414

French baby names in our dictionary

571

French male names

61

5-letter W-names in our dictionary

404

W-male names total

2000–2025

years of US SSA records (26 total)

181,849

total US births named Wyatt (all years)

US Popularity History (2000–2025)

➖ Steady: Wyatt slipped 9 places in the US boys ranking over the last 5 years (#29 in 2020 → #38 in 2025).

Annual US births named Wyatt by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2017 with 9,726 boys named Wyatt (boy rank #25 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #38 for boys (6,480 US births). That's 13 places below its 2017 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 Wyatt 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 Wyatt the strongest states are Wyoming, West Virginia, Arkansas.

Strongest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Wyoming	#9	219
2	West Virginia	#10	657
3	Arkansas	#11	948
4	Vermont	#11	207
5	Oklahoma	#13	1,223
6	Maine	#13	410
7	Montana	#13	348
8	Idaho	#13	617
9	New Hampshire	#14	456
10	Wisconsin	#14	1,701

Weakest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	District of Columbia	#133	80
2	New Jersey	#86	1,028
3	California	#70	5,792
4	New York	#66	2,582
5	New Mexico	#59	316
6	Massachusetts	#56	1,069
7	Hawaii	#54	174
8	Connecticut	#54	597
9	Texas	#53	6,229
10	Rhode Island	#51	180

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

Variant Forms

Name	Meaning	Gender	Origin
Wiatt	Guide	Male	English

Looking for names like Wyatt?

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Compare Wyatt to Other Popular Names

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

Wyatt vs Liam 239,320 births since 2014

Wyatt vs Noah 230,181 births since 2014

Wyatt vs Oliver 164,076 births since 2014

Wyatt vs William 159,918 births since 2014

Wyatt vs James 157,850 births since 2014

Wyatt vs Elijah 153,351 births since 2014

Wyatt vs Benjamin 147,449 births since 2014

Wyatt vs Lucas 141,302 births since 2014

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