Dustin
- Pronunciation
- [Dus-tin]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- A Fighter. Actor Dustin Hoffman.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Dustin
Dustin descends from the Old Norse personal name Þorsteinn, composed of Thor (the Norse god of thunder) and steinn (stone) — yielding "Thor's stone" or "thunder-stone." The name was brought to England by Norse settlers and became established as both a first name and surname.
The name's overwhelming modern American cultural anchor is American actor Dustin Hoffman (Dustin Lee Hoffman, born 1937, the iconic American actor whose career through The Graduate 1967, Midnight Cowboy 1969, Kramer vs. Kramer 1979, and Rain Man 1988 — for which he won two Best Actor Oscars — made him one of the foundational figures of late-20th-century American film). The Dustin Hoffman cultural anchor drove the name's substantial late-1960s, 1970s, and 1980s American adoption.
Other notable bearers include American actor Dustin Henderson of Netflix's Stranger Things 2016–present (played by Gaten Matarazzo); contemporary American basketball player Dustin Sleva; and the contemporary American singer Dustin Lynch. Dustin held a US top-50 boys' rank from 1968 through 2000 — about three decades of consistent American popularity, peaking around 1981 at #14 in the United States. The name has receded since but remains in steady use, currently sitting in the US top 300 boys' rank. The name's appeal is its layered Old Norse-Anglo-Saxon-American pedigree combined with two firm syllables — the in-built Thor's-stone Norse-mythological etymological register, the strong Dustin Hoffman American film cultural anchor, and tonal versatility from rural-American to upwardly-mobile-American. The name reads as both classical-Norse and contemporary American. Common nicknames Dust (the dominant short form, casual and warm), Dusty (alternate, also a popular standalone name on its own), and the rare Stin each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Dustin, Dustyn, and Dustun have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Þorsteinn (Old Norse original) and the broader Thor family.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Dustin
US Popularity History (1975–2025)
Annual US births named Dustin by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1985 with 10,439 boys named Dustin (boy rank #41 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #729 for boys (365 US births). That's 688 places below its 1985 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 Dustin 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 Dustin the strongest states are Montana, West Virginia, Mississippi.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Montana | #210 | 18 |
| 2 | West Virginia | #281 | 56 |
| 3 | Mississippi | #363 | 72 |
| 4 | New Mexico | #371 | 16 |
| 5 | Idaho | #373 | 35 |
| 6 | Kentucky | #443 | 88 |
| 7 | Nevada | #447 | 19 |
| 8 | Arkansas | #459 | 58 |
| 9 | Kansas | #489 | 27 |
| 10 | Ohio | #519 | 197 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Jersey | #842 | 55 |
| 2 | New York | #783 | 160 |
| 3 | Minnesota | #710 | 48 |
| 4 | Illinois | #679 | 112 |
| 5 | Maryland | #669 | 52 |
| 6 | Texas | #651 | 391 |
| 7 | North Carolina | #650 | 128 |
| 8 | Michigan | #642 | 110 |
| 9 | Alabama | #641 | 56 |
| 10 | South Carolina | #636 | 57 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Dustin in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dusty | A Fighter. | Male | English |
Famous People Named Dustin
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Dustin.
- Dustin Hoffman — Movie Actor (1937)
Looking for names like Dustin?
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 Dustin to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Dustin against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).