Holiday Calendar

National Eli Day

Next celebratedThursday, May 20, 2027

The first Eli was a priest of ninety-eight who fell backwards off his seat and broke his neck when the Ark was captured. The day takes his name and the different Hebrew one inside Elijah, spelled the same in English.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEMay 20
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

The name is documented; the holiday is not.

No founder, establishing act, or first observance can be located for National Eli Day. The phrase circulates on holiday listing sites and on social media, but every trail leads to a page with no sourcing of its own, so the day is observed without a documented author.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

Norway keeps Eli on the girls' list

Statistics Norway keeps two lists of first names, one for girls and one for boys. Eli sits on the girls' list. There is no Eli on the boys' list at all, which runs Eliah, Elian, Elias and moves on.

In the United States it runs the other way, and overwhelmingly so. The Social Security Administration has published a list for every birth year since 1880, and Eli appears as a boys' name on all of them.

The two countries are now pulling apart. In 2025, after seventeen straight years inside it, Eli dropped out of America's top hundred boys' names.

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ORIGINS

Eli Day history

INTRODUCTION

The oldest Eli on record sat in a chair beside the doorpost of the temple at Shiloh. He was a priest, he was old, and the text calls his sons scoundrels.

By the end of his story he is ninety-eight. Word arrives that the Ark of God has been captured, and Eli falls backward off his seat and breaks his neck. He had led Israel for forty years.

CHAPTER 01

Two names, one spelling

His name is written in Hebrew with an ayin, and it means ascension, from a verb meaning to ascend. A second Hebrew name is written with an aleph. That one means my God, and it is the element sitting inside Elijah.

English took both and wrote them the same way. So the priest of Shiloh is not a shortened Elijah, and never was.

CHAPTER 02

The name reaches America

Eli has served as an English Christian given name since the Protestant Reformation. One of the Americans who carried it was born in Massachusetts in 1765.

Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin on March 14, 1794. The machine made green-seed cotton profitable across the South and became a key input in the perpetuation of American slavery. Britannica records that his model was inspired by the manual brushes invented by enslaved workers.

His company was gone by 1797, and after Congress refused to renew the patent he concluded that an invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor. A second Eli fared better: Col. Eli Lilly opened a laboratory in Indianapolis on May 10, 1876, under a sign reading Eli Lilly, Chemist.

CHAPTER 03

A day nobody signed

Against all that documentation, the observance itself is bare. No founder, no establishing act and no first observance can be located for National Eli Day. What survives instead is the counting, and statisticians in two countries have been writing this name down since long before anyone thought to give it a day.

GOOD TO KNOW

National Eli Day Around the World

Norway

Statistics Norway lists Eli among girls' names only, on a list limited to first names borne by at least 200 people. Its published counts start at 277 newborn girls in 1945, the earliest year the agency publishes, and fall to 19 in 2025.

Denmark

Eli is a Danish feminine given name, used as a short form of Elisabet or Elin.

Spain

Spanish uses Eli as a feminine short form of Elisabet, pronounced /ˈe.li/ rather than the English /ˈi.laɪ/.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Eli Day

MOMENTUM

Higher than any year before 2002, and falling for thirteen straight

Eli's share of American newborn boys has been higher in every year since 2002 than in any year before it, so its current standing is historically high rather than ordinary. It has still fallen for thirteen years running, which means the name is retreating from a level it had never previously reached.

NEIGHBOURS

Eli's decline is not the family's decline

Elijah has outnumbered Eli in 128 of the 146 years the Social Security Administration has counted, and it still ranked seventh among American boys in 2025. Elias recorded its strongest year of the whole series in that same file, so the wider El- cluster is not falling with Eli.

TROUGH

The name nearly vanished within living memory

Eli sat outside America's top 500 boys' names in 32 of the years between 1938 and 1970. Its weakest year measured by share was 1958, when 117 American boys were registered with the name.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Eli Day by the Numbers

146 of 146
Annual US name files listing Eli
471
US boys' names present every year since 1880
8,079
American boys named Eli in 2012
153,495
American boys named Eli, 1880 to 2025
73
American boys named Eli in 1880

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Eli Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Look up the year your Eli was born

The Social Security Administration publishes a name file for every US birth year back to 1880. Find the one that matches and see exactly where the name stood that year.

SETTLE

Settle which Eli the name came from

Ask whether it arrived as a short form of Elijah or as the older name in its own right. The two answers point at different Hebrew words with different meanings.

SHARE

Share the half of the record people miss

In the United States Eli is overwhelmingly a boys' name, but girls named Eli turn up in 56 of the annual files. The earliest of them were registered in 1916.

READ

Read the opening chapters of First Samuel

They are where the oldest Eli appears, and they run from his first scene to his last. It is a short arc and a bleak one.

MESSAGE

Message every Eli in your contacts

The shape of the day is yours to set, because nothing about it is prescribed. A note to each Eli you know is the whole tradition.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Eli Day?

1 / 8

The priest Eli's Hebrew name derives from a verb meaning what?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance, and no legal standing for it appears in the US federal record, so it is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

10sources
5primary records
3independently dated
Primary records
US Social Security Administration2025
Beyond the Top 1000 Names: national baby name data
Every first name given to at least five US babies of a sex, by birth year since 1880.
View source
Statistics Norway2025
StatBank table 10467: Born persons, by girls' or boys' name
Norway's official count of newborns given each name, split into separate girls' and boys' lists.
View source
Sefaria
I Samuel, Hebrew text with the JPS Tanakh translation
The primary account of the priest Eli, his sons, his blindness and his death at ninety-eight.
View source
National Inventors Hall of Fame
Eli Whitney
The inducting body's record of Whitney's life, his 1794 patent and his verdict on it.
View source
Federal Register
Documents API, exact-phrase search
The searchable record of US federal documents, which returns nothing for this day's name.
View source
Additional coverage
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Eli
The Hebrew name meaning my God, also used as a short form of Elijah.
View source
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Eli (3)
The feminine Eli of Spanish, Norwegian and Danish, a short form of Elisabet or Elin.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Eli Whitney: Biography, Inventions, Cotton Gin, Interchangeable Parts
Whitney's career, and the cotton gin's part in perpetuating slavery in the United States.
View source
Today in Connecticut History2019-03-14
March 14: Eli Whitney Patents the Cotton Gin
The exact patent date, and how the gin spread cotton and enslaved labour through the South.
View source
Encyclopedia of Indianapolis
Col. Eli Lilly
The Civil War officer who opened an Indianapolis pharmaceutical laboratory in 1876.
View source
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