Elliot: Meaning of Baby Name Elliot

About the Name Elliot

Elliot is the modern English form of the medieval Hebrew Eliyahu meaning "my God is Yahweh" — see separate entry on Elijah for the broader Hebrew etymology. The Elliot/Elliott form emerged in medieval England as a contracted vernacular form of the longer Elias, and it appears in English records as both a personal name and a surname continuously since at least the 12th century.

The name's most influential literary anchor is the modernist American-British poet T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1888–1965, using Eliot as a surname), whose foundational 20th-century works The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943) made him one of the most-influential poets in English-language literature. The 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature winner anchored the surname in literary modernist memory. Earlier, English novelist George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880, author of Middlemarch, Silas Marner) gave the surname a literary register. The 1982 Steven Spielberg film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial features a young Elliott as the boy who befriends the alien — a major late-20th-century American cultural anchor.

The American Elliot surge is part of the broader vintage-revival wave alongside Theodore and Henry. The name climbed from outside the US top 200 in 1990 to the US top 100 boys' rank by 2014 and the top 100 since. The name has been used increasingly for both boys and girls. The appeal is its layered literary-and-modern register combined with three syllables and a distinctive double-L middle. Common nicknames Eli, Elie, and the rare Otty each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Elliott (with double T, see separate entry), Eliot (single T and L), and Eliott have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Eliot (older English), Eliott (alternate French), and the related Hebrew Eliyahu family.

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

Quick Facts About Elliot

5,642

English baby names in our dictionary

3,391

English male names

215

6-letter E-names in our dictionary

459

E-male names total

2000–2025

years of US SSA records (26 total)

45,427

total US births named Elliot (all years)

US Popularity History (2000–2025)

📈 Rising: Elliot climbed 13 places in the US boys ranking over the last 5 years (#164 in 2020 → #151 in 2025).

Annual US births named Elliot by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2022 with 2,532 boys named Elliot (boy rank #150 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #151 for boys (2,417 US births). That's 1 places below its 2022 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 Elliot 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 Elliot the strongest states are Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire.

Strongest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Maine	#73	170
2	Vermont	#75	59
3	New Hampshire	#86	156
4	Minnesota	#97	643
5	Wisconsin	#103	590
6	Oregon	#103	389
7	Massachusetts	#112	583
8	North Dakota	#116	107
9	Michigan	#118	848
10	Rhode Island	#123	88

Weakest boys-name states

#	State	Avg rank	Births
1	Georgia	#251	444
2	South Carolina	#246	195
3	Maryland	#239	240
4	Alabama	#235	225
5	Texas	#232	1,600
6	Mississippi	#225	140
7	New Mexico	#225	91
8	Nevada	#210	151
9	Arkansas	#207	172
10	West Virginia	#205	104

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

Variant Forms

Name	Meaning	Gender	Origin
Eli	Ascended Or My God. The Biblical High Priest Eli Judged Israel For 40 Years And Instructed The Young Samuel.	Male	Hebrew
Eliot	Believes In God	Male	French
Elliott	Variant Of Elijah My God Is Jehovah.	Male	English

Looking for names like Elliot?

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Compare Elliot to Other Popular Names

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

Elliot vs Liam 239,320 births since 2014

Elliot vs Noah 230,181 births since 2014

Elliot vs Oliver 164,076 births since 2014

Elliot vs William 159,918 births since 2014

Elliot vs James 157,850 births since 2014

Elliot vs Elijah 153,351 births since 2014

Elliot vs Benjamin 147,449 births since 2014

Elliot vs Lucas 141,302 births since 2014

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