Holiday Calendar

National Sam Day

Next celebratedTuesday, July 13, 2027

Sam has never really been counted, because every Samuel and Samantha who answers to it is registered under the long name. July 13 was picked for them by a listing site that had found four social media mentions.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJuly 13
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

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

A name day that arrived by circulation, not by declaration.

No founder, proclamation, statute or trademark filing for National Sam Day has been identified. The earliest trace found is an automated name-day listing captured by the Internet Archive in August 2015, which derived its date from counting social media mentions and gave July 7 that year rather than July 13.

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INTRO

Dictionaries disagree about what Sam is short for

National Sam Day honors a name the national record keeps losing track of. Samantha reached her American peak in 1990. That year the Social Security Administration counted 25,868 newborn girls with the name, and exactly five girls registered as Sam.

Thirty five years later the two had swapped direction. Samantha was down to 1,973 girls. Sam was up to 24, its strongest year for girls in nearly a century.

If Sam were simply short for Samantha, the two would rise and fall together. They do not. That settles nothing about where the name comes from, because the register counts the name written on a birth certificate, not the name anyone answers to.

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ORIGINS

Sam Day history

INTRODUCTION

Ask what Sam is short for and you get more than one answer. Behind the Name files it as a short form of Samuel, Samson and Samantha, and marks it masculine and feminine alike. The Online Etymology Dictionary calls it a masculine proper name shortened from Samuel, and mentions the other two nowhere.

The disagreement is not a small one. It decides whether Sam is one name or three, and whether it belongs to men or to everybody.

CHAPTER 01

Two roots that only look alike

Samuel comes from the Hebrew Shemuʾel, built from shem, meaning name, and el, meaning God. Behind the Name offers a second reading in which the first element is shama, to hear, giving the sense God has heard. Samson comes from a different word entirely, shemesh, the Hebrew for sun.

CHAPTER 02

What a birth register cannot see

The Social Security Administration has counted American given names since 1880. A Samantha who answers to Sam her whole life is counted as Samantha, and never once appears in Sam's column. The same goes for every Samuel who has ever gone by Sam.

So the data describes the registered Sam and nothing else. That Sam ranked 36th among American boys when the series opened. It has not been among the hundred most common American boys' names since 1926.

CHAPTER 03

A date assembled from four tweets

The observance itself leaves a thinner trail. The earliest archived listing found for the day was captured in 2015. It gives the day as July 7, while the current listings and calendars carry July 13.

That site set its dates by counting social media mentions, and said so on the page. It had found four references to Sam Day that year. No founder, proclamation or trademark filing has been located for the day at all.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Sam ranks 36th among boys

The federal name series opens with Sam as the 36th most common American boys' name.

Girls first listed as Sam

The earliest year the federal series lists American girls registered as Sam.

Sam peaks as a girls' name

Thirty six girls were registered as Sam, the highest count for girls the series has ever shown.

Last appearance in the top 100

Sam ranked among the hundred most common American boys' names for the final time.

A listing picks the date

The earliest archived listing found for the day selected July 7 from a count of social media mentions.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Sam Day by the Numbers

127,234
US boys registered Sam since 1880
1,576
US girls registered Sam since 1880
647
Sam's US boys rank in 2025
146
Straight years Samuel ranked top 100
22.4%
Women among Dutch first-name Sams

GOOD TO KNOW

Sams that turned into English words

Sam Slick

The type of the resourceful Yankee, a character created in 1835 by the Nova Scotian judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton.

Sam Hill

An American English euphemism for Hell, attested in print by 1839.

Sam Browne

The belt with a shoulder strap, recorded by 1915 and named for Sir Samuel James Browne, the British general who invented it.

Sam Spade

The detective at the center of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon.

Samwise

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954, Sam is the short form of this name.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Sam Day Matters

MEASUREMENT

The people who actually answer to Sam have never been counted.

Only people whose paperwork reads Sam are counted as Sam. The number who actually answer to the name has never been measured in any year of the series.

SHIFT

The registered name is drifting toward girls

Girls were 0.87% of registered Sams across the series' first four decades. Across the most recent fifteen years they were 3.01%.

CIRCULATION

The day travels without an organizer

Holiday listings carry July 13 forward each year, and that is the whole of its machinery. Minor name days survive on circulation rather than on any institution's calendar.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Sam Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Ask a Sam what is on their birth certificate

The answer might be Samuel, Samson, Samantha, or simply Sam. Each one is a different route to the same three letters.

LOOK

Look up your own birth year in the data

The Social Security Administration publishes every American given name back to 1880 in downloadable yearly files. Search for Sam and read the count for the year you were born.

READ

Read two dictionaries side by side

Open the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for Sam in one tab and the Behind the Name entry in another. Reading them together takes a minute and shows exactly where the two reference works part company.

SEND

Send a note to a Sam you know

A name day is a low-stakes reason to message someone you have not spoken to in a year. If you know more than one Sam, say which longer name you mean, because it may not be the one you assume.

WATCH

Watch for the gap where small counts vanish

The federal files leave out any name given to fewer than five babies in a year. A missing year for Sam means too few were registered, not none.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Sam Day?

1 / 8

In which year did Sam last rank among the 100 most common American boys' names?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance, not a federal or state holiday, so schools and offices stay open as normal. A full-text search of federal documents published since 1994 returns nothing that names the day.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

9sources
5primary records
4independently dated
Primary records
U.S. Social Security Administration2026-03
Popular Baby Names: national data on the frequency of given names
Year-by-year counts of every American given name since 1880, split by sex.
View source
Meertens Instituut2017
Nederlandse Voornamenbank: voornaam Sam
How many Dutch men and women hold Sam as a first name.
View source
U.S. Government Publishing Office1989
Proclamation 6016: Uncle Sam Day, 1989 (Statutes at Large, vol. 103)
The law and proclamation naming September 13, 1989 for Samuel Wilson of Troy.
View source
Office of the Federal Register
Federal Register document search API
Full-text search of federal documents published from 1994 onward.
View source
Internet Archive2015-08-29
Archived name-day listing for Sam, 29 August 2015
The oldest saved National Sam Day page, dating the day from four tweets.
View source
Additional coverage
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Sam (1)
Files Sam as masculine and feminine, short for Samuel, Samson or Samantha.
View source
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Samuel
The Hebrew roots of Samuel and its unbroken run in the American top 100.
View source
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Samson
Traces Samson to shemesh, the Hebrew word for sun.
View source
Online Etymology Dictionary
Sam: etymology, origin and meaning
Lists Sam as masculine from Samuel, with dates for Sam Hill and Sam Browne.
View source
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