Andy

91,633 people in America carry this name — ranked #582 of 923.

Carried mostly by Generation Z.

Say it AN dee

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

AE1 N D IY0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 91,633 2020 Census
  • Rank #582 Familiar
  • Per 100,000 30.3 about 1 in 3,617 people

The meaning and origin of Andy

Greek in origin, reading literally as “man”.

Origins are a matter of scholarly argument rather than record, and a name can be traced more than one way. We state one reading and say where it came from.

How often Andy has been given

92,140 babies were given this name since 1880. The busiest year was 2005, with 1,938 of them.

80 90 00 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 00s 10 20

Most people carrying it were born in the 2000s. It has been given less often of late.

Counted from Social Security card applications, so it covers births registered in the United States and leaves out names given to fewer than five babies in a year.

Middle names for Andy

Two syllables sit with almost anything — the join matters more than the length.

Better avoided

  • Andy Andrew — same opening
  • Andy Anthony — same opening
  • Andy Alexander — same opening

Chosen by sound from the pronouncing dictionary, then ordered by how often the name is given. None of it is a rule — the ear decides.

What Andy is short for

Andy is a short form of Andrew.

Short forms as recorded in a 19th-century glossary of Christian names, so the list is old rather than complete.

Is Andy a boy's or a girl's name?

98.4% men
1,510 women

As recorded on census returns, not as anyone thinks the name ought to be used.

Spellings of Andy

Andy is how 5.7% of them spell it — 1,596,553 people answer to the sound.

Each spelling is its own census entry — the counts never overlap, so the shares are of the group, not of the country.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

The most common full names

The census counts first names and surnames separately and never together, so these are estimates: how often the two halves would meet if they paired at random. They do not — names cluster by community — so read them as an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 40.2%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 3.9%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 32.8%
  • Two or more races — 1.5%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 21.0%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.6%

Categories are how people answered the census — a fact about the bearers, not a property of the name. Conclusions are ours, not the Census Bureau’s.

This name in other languages

  • Ata Lapp
  • Anta Lapp
  • Necek Slov
  • Bandi Hungarian
  • Attok Lapp
  • André French
  • Ondrej Bohemian
  • Dandie Scottish
  • Andrew English
  • Andres Spanish
  • Anders Danish
  • Andrea Italian
  • Andrée French
  • Andrej Lus

Forms of one name traced to the same root. Spellings are as the glossary printed them, so some look older than the versions in use today.

Try it Name Matcher

Enter a surname and hear which first names sit well with it.

The matcher is confident about clashes — rhymes, doubled sounds, colliding stresses — because those are facts about the phonemes. Ordering the names that pass is a set of rules, not a verdict on beauty.

Open Name Matcher on its own page

Where this page gets its numbers

  • Counts, ranks and shares: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census tabulations of first and last names occurring 100 or more times. Percentages, bands and groupings are our own arithmetic — the conclusions are ours, not the Bureau’s.
  • Pronunciation, syllables and rhyme groups: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University. The plain-English respelling is ours.
  • Origins and the forms a name takes in other languages: Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names, 1884 — a public-domain work. Scholarship has moved on since, so read it as one reading of a name, not the last word.

Below a hundred people we publish no figure at all — the same threshold the Census Bureau applies to us. What each source covers
Other names of Greek origin