Holiday Calendar

National Keith Day

Next celebratedSaturday, November 7, 2026

Every Keith is named after a patch of ground in East Lothian, about a mile from Humbie, where a gable wall of the old church still stands. November 7 belongs to a name at least 437,907 American boys have carried away from it.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATENovember 7
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

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

Another listing gives it a July date instead.

No founder, establishing act or first observance has been documented for National Keith Day. It circulates through holiday listings, print-on-demand merchandise and social reposts, and even its date is contested, with one listing giving July 6 instead.

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

What is left of the place this name came from

National Keith Day marks a name that is quietly leaving the country that produced it. In 2025, four boys in the whole of Scotland were registered as Keith.

That is not a small-country rounding error. National Records of Scotland has published fifty-two years of birth registrations, and in eleven of them the count of boys named Keith was too low for the agency to disclose. All eleven of those years fall in 2010-2024.

Keith travelled better than it stayed. Social Security's American name files cover 1880-2025. Across them, at least 437,907 boys have been given the name.

And the thing every one of them is named after is not a person. It is a patch of ground in East Lothian, about a mile from Humbie.

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ORIGINS

Keith Day history

INTRODUCTION

In woodland north of Humbie, a gable wall is still standing. It belongs to Keith Church, which the Gazetteer for Scotland dates to about 1225 and describes as the parish church and the Keith family's private chapel. The ruin is a scheduled ancient monument, and what survives includes a vesica window set above two Gothic arched windows.

Keith is not a village you can walk around. The Gazetteer lists it as a location and former parish, and what carries the name on the ground now is a house, that church ruin, and three farms called Keith Mains, Nether Keith and Upper Keith.

CHAPTER 01

The family that carried the name out

The house is Keith Marischal, built as an L-plan tower house in 1589 for George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal. The Gazetteer says his family had held the lands since a grant by King David I.

The name was already travelling without them. The Dictionary of American Family Names records that numerous bearers of the surname settled in Ulster during the 1600s, one documented route by which an East Lothian estate name spread beyond Scotland. The family did not keep the estate itself, and it passed to the Earls of Hopetoun in 1696.

CHAPTER 02

From a surname to a first name

For centuries Keith was something you inherited, not something you were called. Behind the Name records its use as a given name only since the 1800s, and says it became fairly common across the English-speaking world in the century that followed.

The American files put a date on the change. Keith first clears Social Security's reporting floor in 1888, with six boys, and it is missing from the eight files before that.

CHAPTER 03

A day nobody signed

The observance has no such paper trail. No founder, establishing act or first observance has been documented for National Keith Day, and even the date is disputed, with one holiday site giving July 6 instead.

That blank is not the interesting part of Keith. The interesting part is that the name has a written trail running back to a church built in the 1220s, and hardly anyone who carries it has followed it.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Keith Day Matters

EVIDENCE

Behind the Name files Keith under uncertain etymology.

Behind the Name says the name is possibly from a Celtic root meaning wood, and files Keith under uncertain etymology. The Dictionary of American Family Names gives the same derivation with no hedge at all, so two careful references disagree about how sure anyone should be.

CALENDAR

No Keith among the saints of the date

The saints the Church remembers on November 7 are Willibrord and Prosdocimus. Keith is not one of them, so this date is a name day in the modern secular sense rather than a feast.

LONGEVITY

Keith's long run was an ordinary one

Of the 394 boys' names that have ever entered Social Security's top 100, 115 held it for a longer unbroken stretch than Keith's forty-six years. A run that made the name feel permanent to one American generation is, in the file, an unremarkable one.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Keith Day by the Numbers

12,437
Keith births, Social Security 1957 file
0.651%
Keith's share of 1966 listed boys
311
Keith births, Social Security 2025 file

TIMELINE

Timeline

A church on the Keith lands

The Gazetteer for Scotland dates Keith Church, both the parish church and the Keith family's own chapel, to about this year.

A tower house for an earl

Keith Marischal was built as an L-plan tower house for George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal.

The Keiths lose the estate

The house passed out of the family and to the Earls of Hopetoun.

Six American boys named Keith

The name first cleared Social Security's five-birth reporting floor, which is where the American record for it begins.

Keith enters the American top 100

It had never placed higher than 104th in any earlier year of the files.

The run ends

Keith dropped out of Social Security's top 100 after this year and has not been back.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Keith Day

A second Keith comes out of German

The Dictionary of American Family Names records a separate German surname Keith, a nickname from the Middle High German kit, meaning sprout or offspring. It has no connection to the Scottish name.

Girls were named Keith too

Social Security's files count 2,216 girls given the name between 1880 and 2025. The last year it reached the five-birth reporting floor for girls was 2007.

Keith's total leaves the near-spellings out

Social Security's files separately hold 2,837 boys spelled Kieth, 228 Keath and 59 Keyth, none of them folded into Keith's total. National Records of Scotland states plainly that it counts different spellings as different names.

Two honest sources rank Keith differently

Read by Social Security's own stated rule, its 2025 file puts Keith 801st among boys. Behind the Name prints 800th. The gap is the tie-breaking convention, not a mistake.

One Keith Day began with an autocorrect

At a high school in Akron, Ohio, seniors built a Keith Day after a phone turned 'Happy Birthday' into 'Happy keith day'. They set it on November 29, an English footballer's birthday, and the school paper wrote it up in 2018.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

Keith comes from a Scottish Gaelic word, ceiteach, meaning wood or forest.

The truth

Am Faclair Beag, a standard Scottish Gaelic dictionary, holds no headword ceiteach at all. The root the reference works actually give is Brythonic Celtic, a different branch from Gaelic.

The myth

The name comes from the town of Keith in the north of Scotland.

The truth

The two reference works consulted here both point somewhere else. The Dictionary of American Family Names calls Keith a habitational name from the lands of Keith in East Lothian, about a mile from Humbie, and Behind the Name calls it an estate there.

The myth

Keith has always been a first name.

The truth

It was a Scottish surname for centuries first, taken from the place rather than from any person. Behind the Name, the Dictionary of American Family Names and the Gazetteer for Scotland all describe it that way.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Keith Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Read the reference entry for the name

The entry at Behind the Name runs a few lines and keeps the hedge that most retellings drop. It also lists the three scholarly works the entry rests on.

FIND

Find the place on a map

Keith in East Lothian sits about a mile north north west of Humbie and is easy to miss entirely. The Gazetteer for Scotland names the farms that still carry it.

ASK

Ask a Keith how the name reached them

The registries record how many Keiths there were and never why any one of them was called it. That answer only exists inside families, and only for as long as someone asks.

LOOK

Look the name up in a national register

National Records of Scotland publishes every first name given in Scotland back to 1974, free to download. Social Security publishes the American equivalent back to 1880.

CHECK

Check a name claim before repeating it

Most of what circulates about Keith's meaning traces back to sites that cite nothing at all. A dictionary or a reference work with footnotes settles it in about a minute.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Keith Day?

1 / 8

The reference works trace the name Keith to which of these?

Answer

No. No government or public body has been found to recognise it, so it is a normal working day wherever you are.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

11sources
6primary records
7independently dated
Primary records
Social Security AdministrationData as of March 1, 2026
Beyond the Top 1000 Names: national data on the relative frequency of given names
The year-by-year national name files, 1880 to 2025, and the NationalReadMe that states their universe (US births with a Social Security number), their five-occurrence privacy floor, and their ranking rule. Every US figure on this page is computed from these files.
View source
National Records of ScotlandPublished May 26, 2026
Babies' First Names, 2025
The published full list of every first name given in Scotland from 1974 to 2025, with counts and ranks. NRS suppresses any name with a Scotland-wide count of two or fewer, and counts different spellings separately.
View source
Am Faclair Beag
Scottish Gaelic dictionary search: ceiteach
Returns no headword for ceiteach, the word the popular account of Keith's meaning attributes to Scottish Gaelic.
View source
Am Faclair Beag
Scottish Gaelic dictionary search: coille
Returns coille, forest and wood, so the dictionary does hold the ordinary Gaelic word for a wood.
View source
Vatican News
Saint of the Day: Calendar of Saints of 11/07
Lists the saints the Church remembers on November 7, St Willibrord and St Prosdocimus. No Saint Keith appears.
View source
The Hoban VisorNovember 29, 2018
Keith Day: A Hoban phenomenon
A student newspaper's account of a separate Keith Day created at Archbishop Hoban High School in Akron, Ohio, held on November 29 and traced to a phone autocorrect.
View source
Additional coverage
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Keith
Traces the given name to a Scottish surname and an estate in East Lothian, hedges the Celtic root meaning wood as possible rather than certain, tags the name under uncertain etymology, dates its use as a first name to the 19th century, and prints its 2025 US rank as 800th.
View source
Behind the NameEntry updated May 26, 2026
Meaning, origin and history of the surname Keith
The surname entry for the same name, citing the identical three scholarly references while upgrading the hedge from possibly to probably derived.
View source
Ancestry, reproducing the Dictionary of American Family Names, 2nd edition2022
Keith Surname Meaning
Calls Keith a Scottish habitational name from the lands of Keith in East Lothian, from British Celtic cait- meaning wood, records 17th-century settlement of bearers in Ulster, and files a separate German Keith from Middle High German kit, sprout or offspring.
View source
The Gazetteer for Scotland2021
Keith: Overview
Describes Keith in East Lothian as a location and former parish a mile north north west of Humbie, and names the farms at Keith Mains, Nether Keith and Upper Keith that still carry it.
View source
The Gazetteer for Scotland2022
Keith Marischal
Records the 1589 L-plan tower house built for George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal, the family's tenure of the lands, the 1696 passage of the property to the Earls of Hopetoun, and Keith Church of about 1225, now a scheduled ancient monument.
View source
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