Eboni
Feminine · “ebony”
Eboni is overwhelmingly a girls’ name — 6,522 girls against 5 boys since 1880.
Ebony is an Egyptian word. The Egyptians called the black heartwood hebeny, the Greeks took it as ebenos, and it reached English through Latin and French with the sense unchanged — one of a small number of English words that can be traced back to ancient Egyptian rather than stopping at Greek. The bare i ending is American and much newer.
How old is the name Eboni?
Eboni first appears in US birth records in 1970 — 55 years ago. The typical Eboni alive today was born around 1989, making them about 36 years old. About 6,400 people named Eboni are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Eboni most popular?
Eboni peaked in 1982, reaching #637 nationally. See the whole 1982 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From hebeny to Eboni
The story of Eboni
Ebony entered American naming in the later twentieth century as part of a broader move toward names that named something valued and specifically Black — alongside a magazine of that title which had been in American households since the nineteen-forties and made the word familiar in that sense. The word-name tradition it belongs to is old and unembarrassed: a name chosen because the word says what a family wants said. The bare i ending places this spelling in the same decades as Jodi, Terri and Lori, and marks it as a full name rather than a shortening.
Meaning
ebony; the black wood
Egyptian hebeny names the dense black timber of certain tropical trees, prized in the ancient world for furniture and carving and traded up the Nile. Greek borrowed it, Latin took it from Greek, and English has it as ebony. The derivation is documented and is one of the clearest lines from ancient Egyptian into a modern European language. The name is that word, used directly.
How the name formed
- hebeny
- ebenos
- ebony
- Eboni
Related forms: Ébène · Ébano
Pronouncing Eboni
EB-uh-nee
EB-uh-nee, three syllables, stress at the front, the middle reduced. The bare i is a long e, exactly as in Jodi and Lori. There is no competing reading of the spelling.
Nicknames for Eboni
Moderate
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1970
- Most girls named
- 1982282 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #637reached in 1982
- Change vs 2021
- −16.7%5 in 2022, from 6
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Eboni in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Ébène in French — related form
- Ébano in Spanish — related form
Ebonis among us
people named Eboni are estimated to be alive in the US today
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
Questions parents actually ask
Fashion outlook
Eboni sits outside the current charts, and that is its own kind of answer: naming cycles can only date the names they carried up. A name this rare has no decade stamped on it — it cannot go out of fashion, because it was never in.
Based on 146 years of naming cycles. How we read them
The trade-off
- The word is completely familiar and the name is never mispronounced.
- The Egyptian origin is documented and genuinely unusual for an English word.
- Three syllables with a front stress, which carries a short surname well.
- Ebony is the standard spelling and this one will be rewritten as that on most documents.
- It is a word name and the word describes a color, which is a association some families want and others do not.
- The bare i ending places the name in a fairly narrow stretch of the last century.
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Eboni
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Ebonis are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 6,400 people named Eboni are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Eboni in 2025?
- Eboni is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Eboni with classmates?
- Eboni will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More E names
The most-given names starting with E, all years combined.
Elizabeth#17 · Emily#34 · Emma#3 · Evelyn#8 · Ella#29 · Eleanor#12 · Erin#833 · Edna#2458
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Eboni? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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