Jeffery
- Pronunciation
- [Je-ffe-ry]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Peaceful. Variant Of Geoffrey In Use Since Medieval Times.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Jeffery
Jeffery is an alternative spelling of Jeffrey, itself a variant of the medieval name Geoffrey — a name whose ultimate etymology is debated among scholars but is broadly associated with Germanic elements for territory-peace or traveller-peace, conveying a sense of tranquillity and measured bearing traditionally rendered as "peaceful." As a spelling form, Jeffery distinguishes itself only visually from the more common Jeffrey, belonging to the mid-century American practice of personalising well-established names through minor orthographic variation without altering pronunciation.
The name's cultural trajectory closely shadows that of the broader Jeffrey/Jeffery family, which belonged to the postwar generation of smooth-sounding masculine names — approachable, professional, and free of the Victorian stiffness of an earlier era. It was a name that felt modern in the 1960s without being overtly fashionable, carrying a quiet credibility that sustained it across several decades.
In US Social Security records, Jeffery first entered the top-1000 in 1954 and peaked at #42 in 1966, accumulating more than 191,000 top-1000 births across its span. It exited the chart in 2020 with 215 births at #993, demonstrating a remarkably long tail of quiet use. The recorded variant is Jeffry.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Jeffery
US Popularity History (1954–2020)
Annual US births named Jeffery by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1962 with 9,281 boys named Jeffery (boy rank #45 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2020, ranked #993 for boys (215 US births). That's 948 places below its 1962 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 Jeffery 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 Jeffery the strongest states are Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alabama | #471 | 76 |
| 2 | Arkansas | #473 | 28 |
| 3 | Mississippi | #511 | 41 |
| 4 | Kentucky | #528 | 48 |
| 5 | Louisiana | #579 | 50 |
| 6 | Tennessee | #606 | 95 |
| 7 | Georgia | #610 | 115 |
| 8 | South Carolina | #631 | 32 |
| 9 | Oklahoma | #640 | 19 |
| 10 | North Carolina | #651 | 38 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Jeffery in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jeffry | Peaceful. Variant Of Jeffrey. | Male | English |
Looking for names like Jeffery?
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 Jeffery to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Jeffery against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).