Dillon
- Pronunciation
- [Di-llon]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Like A Lion.
- Origin
- French
About the Name Dillon
Dillon is a modern American spelling variant of Dylan (see separate entry on Dylan for the Welsh etymology — meaning "son of the sea" — and the iconic Welsh poet Dylan Thomas anchor). The Dil-lon spelling Dillon is essentially a 20th-century American/Irish-American variant.
The various spellings (Dillon, Dylan, Dyllan) are tracked separately by SSA and represent the same underlying name family. The Dillon spelling has additional Irish-Gaelic etymological lines — possibly from the Old French surname de Léon (lion) or from the Old Irish surname Ó Duilleáin meaning "loyal." The name has been used continuously in Irish-American naming for over a century.
Notable bearers include American basketball player Dillon Brooks (using Brooks as a surname, born 1996, the iconic Canadian NBA forward); American actor Dillon Lane; the iconic American Marshal Dillon of CBS's Gunsmoke (1955–1975, the iconic American Western TV series); and the contemporary fictional Dillon of various contemporary novels. Dillon held a US top-100 boys' rank from 1995 through 2010 — about fifteen years of consistent American popularity. The name has receded slightly since but remains in steady use, currently sitting in the US top 300 boys' rank. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the in-built Welsh-Dylan or Irish-Gaelic loyal pedigree, the popular two-syllable -lon ending family (Dillon, Dalton, Dustin), and the modern visual presence. Two firm syllables, soft consonants, and tonal versatility from rural-American to upwardly-mobile-American. The name reads as both classical-Celtic and contemporary American. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — Dill (the dominant short form, casual and warm) and the rare Lon each occasionally appear; the alternate spellings Dillon, Dylan (the Welsh original), and Dyllan have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Dylan (Welsh original), and the broader Welsh Dylan/Irish Dillon family.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Dillon
US Popularity History (1992–2025)
Annual US births named Dillon by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1992 with 5,063 boys named Dillon (boy rank #73 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #930 for boys (253 US births). That's 857 places below its 1992 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 Dillon 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 Dillon the strongest states are Idaho, Connecticut, Colorado.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Idaho | #362 | 18 |
| 2 | Connecticut | #427 | 31 |
| 3 | Colorado | #431 | 108 |
| 4 | Iowa | #448 | 31 |
| 5 | Massachusetts | #448 | 100 |
| 6 | Louisiana | #470 | 77 |
| 7 | Mississippi | #475 | 25 |
| 8 | Arkansas | #489 | 39 |
| 9 | Nevada | #516 | 21 |
| 10 | South Carolina | #516 | 49 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Dillon in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Looking for names like Dillon?
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 Dillon to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Dillon against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).