Ezekiel

Meaning & origin

A name that sat on the shelf for a century is now one of America's favorites. Ezekiel appears in the earliest Social Security records, from 1880, but spent generations as a dusty Puritan relic before beginning a nearly forty-year climb in 1986. That climb crested in 2022, and in 2025 the name held at No. 61, reaching about 1 in every 336 newborns, remarkable altitude for four syllables of exile-era prophecy.

The revival ran on two engines: the great wave of long biblical boys' names that carried Elijah and Isaiah into the top ten, and the effortless cool of Zeke, which lets a boy carry a major prophet lightly. Ezekiel's geography is distinctive too, with its strongest concentrations in Hawaii, New Mexico, and Wyoming, states where Spanish-language Ezequiel and strong church communities reinforce it. Football fans add Ezekiel Elliott to the name's modern résumé.

Ezekiel renders the Hebrew Yechezkel, a compound of chazaq ("to strengthen") and El ("God"), usually translated "God strengthens." Its bearer was the priest-prophet of the Babylonian exile whose visions fill the biblical book that carries his name. Like most weighty Old Testament names, it entered everyday English use after the Reformation and was a fixture among Puritans in colonial New England, giving America the durable short form Zeke. It appears in Social Security records from 1880 but spent most of the twentieth century as a rarity; since 1986 it has risen almost without interruption as part of the broad revival of multisyllabic biblical names alongside Elijah, Isaiah, and Josiah, peaking in 2022.

Read more: Ezekiel on Wikipedia