Colt
- Pronunciation
- [Colt]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- From The Dark Town
- Origin
- English
About the Name Colt
Colt descends from the English word "colt" meaning "young male horse" — referring to a horse under four years old. The word's connection to the American firearms manufacturer Colt's Manufacturing Company (founded 1855 by Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolving-cylinder revolver — the "Colt revolver" of American Western mythology) gave the name a substantial American Western-frontier register.
Colt as a personal name has no significant pre-20th-century history; the name appears in SSA records starting in the 1970s and accelerated dramatically through the 2010s. The name belongs to the broader rural-Americana naming wave alongside Wyatt, Easton, and Colton. The single most influential modern bearer is country music singer Colt Ford (born Jason Farris Brown, 1969, country rapper and former professional golfer).
Colt's American climb is one of the more striking 21st-century boys'-naming events: the name climbed from outside the US top 1000 in 1990 to the US top 200 boys' rank by 2014 and the top 100 by 2022. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the in-built Western-frontier register from the firearm-and-young-horse imagery, the compact one-syllable hard-consonant structure, and the modern American masculine sound. The name reads as decisively masculine, rural-Americana, and confidence-coded. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — Colty and the rare Coltsie each occasionally appear; the longer formal Colton (see separate entry) is sometimes used as Colt's official-document version. There are no significant international variants since the name's first-name use is essentially American.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Colt
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Colt by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2019 with 1,833 boys named Colt (boy rank #210 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #285 for boys (1,188 US births). That's 75 places below its 2019 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 Colt 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 Colt the strongest states are Wyoming, Montana, West Virginia.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wyoming | #59 | 35 |
| 2 | Montana | #98 | 121 |
| 3 | West Virginia | #101 | 202 |
| 4 | Oklahoma | #118 | 393 |
| 5 | Idaho | #118 | 185 |
| 6 | North Dakota | #131 | 86 |
| 7 | South Dakota | #131 | 84 |
| 8 | Alaska | #145 | 28 |
| 9 | Iowa | #149 | 261 |
| 10 | Missouri | #160 | 468 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Jersey | #657 | 94 |
| 2 | Massachusetts | #567 | 68 |
| 3 | New York | #522 | 308 |
| 4 | California | #412 | 789 |
| 5 | Connecticut | #380 | 52 |
| 6 | Maryland | #340 | 157 |
| 7 | Illinois | #340 | 336 |
| 8 | Florida | #337 | 530 |
| 9 | Georgia | #317 | 333 |
| 10 | New Mexico | #293 | 51 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Colt in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coltrane | Variant Of Colt Young Horse:Frisky. | Male | English |
Looking for names like Colt?
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 Colt to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Colt 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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