Holiday Calendar

National Seth Day

Next celebratedSunday, January 31, 2027

Seth has never been fashionable and has never gone away either, which is a fair thing to keep a day for. The verse that first hands out the name stops to explain it, as a son set in place of a murdered brother.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJanuary 31
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

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

A hashtag with a date and no paper trail.

The day circulates in dated public posts under the tags #NationalSethDay and #SethDay on and around January 31, but no primary record identifies who set it or when. Competing start years are passed around online without documentation.

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INTRO

Never absent from the top 1,000, never inside the top 50

The federal record of American baby names runs back to 1880. Seth has never once been left off the boys' list. National Seth Day belongs to a name with 146 unbroken years behind it.

That list runs 1,000 names deep. Seth has never reached the top 50 of it. The best the name ever managed was 63rd.

That peak came in 2000. Ranked the way the agency ranks, ordinally, with ties broken alphabetically, the national file shows 3,777 boys' names reaching that list at some point. Exactly 181 of them never left it, and Seth is one.

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ORIGINS

Seth Day history

INTRODUCTION

Genesis 4 ends with a killing and a replacement. Cain has murdered Abel, and a third son is born to take his place. His mother names the boy Seth.

The verse does not leave that name unexplained. It stops to give its own reason: God has provided another offspring in place of Abel. The Hebrew verb sitting in that reason clause is the word the name plays on.

CHAPTER 01

What the lexicons make of it

Brown-Driver-Briggs, the standard Hebrew lexicon, marks the name at Genesis 4:25 as explained from the root shith, meaning to put, place or set. The JPS translators put the same observation in a footnote of their own. English Bibles have rendered the wordplay as appointed, granted, provided and established.

That lexicon lists the patriarch at eight verses of the Hebrew Bible, seven of them in Genesis and one in Chronicles. Luke's genealogy of Jesus closes on the same man.

CHAPTER 02

A name with no medieval past

Seth has no medieval English currency at all. Behind the Name dates its entry into English use to after the Protestant Reformation. An Old Testament name with no English past arrived late, and then never left.

CHAPTER 03

The federal file, and the day on top of it

By the time the Social Security Administration opened its national file, Seth was already on it. The name went to 25 boys that first year.

By 1930, half a century on, it had barely moved. Just 55 American boys were given it that year. The peak was still seventy years away.

National Seth Day sits on top of all of that, and on almost nothing else. The name has a federal ledger, a lexicon entry and a verse that explains it. The day has a hashtag.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Seth Day

EVIDENCE

1,247 federal documents print the word Seth. None of them print this day.

The Federal Register prints the word Seth in 1,247 documents and National Seth Day in none of them. What the day has instead is a name with an unusually complete public record.

MIDDLE

The value of never being fashionable

Only 76 of the always-present names also stayed out of the top 50, and Seth is one of them. That is a different achievement from a hit name: the field it stayed inside kept growing, and it held on without a trend ever pushing it.

EDGES

What the federal count cannot see

The American figures here come from the Social Security Administration's national file for the exact spelling Seth, boys, 1880 through 2025. The agency leaves out any name given to fewer than five babies of one sex in a year, so those counts are a floor rather than a census, and the same file records 495 girls given the name across the same span.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Seth Day by the Numbers

165,793
US boys named Seth since 1880
6,717 boys
Seth's peak year, 2000
505
Seth births in the US, 2025
156
Seth births, England and Wales 2025
1,058 to 13,930
Boys' names on the federal list, 1880 vs 2025

GOOD TO KNOW

Notable Seths in the American record

Seth Boyden

The Newark inventor opened the first US patent-leather factory in 1819 and is credited by the National Inventors Hall of Fame with the first daguerreotype made in the United States.

Seth Thomas

He helped Eli Terry fill an order of 4,000 tall-case clocks in three years, then built his own works at Plymouth Hollow, which was renamed Thomaston for him in 1875.

Seth Eastman

A West Point cadet at sixteen who became an army officer and a painter, he made 17 pictures of US military forts for Congress between 1870 and 1875, and died in his Washington studio, reportedly while finishing the last one.

Seth Low

He ran Columbia as its president from 1890 to 1901, then was elected mayor of New York City in 1901 on an anti-Tammany fusion ticket.

Seth Bullock

Deadwood's first sheriff and a US Marshal, he was appointed an early Forest Supervisor of the Black Hills by Theodore Roosevelt and built the Mount Roosevelt Friendship Tower for him in 1919.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

The given name Seth comes from the Egyptian god Seth, the brother who killed Osiris.

The truth

They are two unrelated names that arrived at the same English spelling. Behind the Name keeps a separate entry for each and cross-links them only under the heading 'Same Spelling'. The given name descends from the Hebrew Shet, meaning placed or set. The god's name reaches English through the Greek form of an Egyptian name reconstructed as Sutekh, recorded as being of unknown meaning. The collision happened in Greek transcription and is not an etymology. The two records run opposite ways. The Hebrew name arrives with its sense written into the verse that gives it. The Egyptian one keeps a meaning nobody has recovered, an animal emblem Egyptologists cannot identify, and a name effaced from many monuments in the 1st millennium BCE. The Hebrew Seth is born after a brother is killed. The Egyptian Seth is the brother-killer.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Seth Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Look up the name in your birth decade

The Social Security Administration publishes a top-names table for every decade, and the 1960s list is a good place to start. Find where Seth sat, then check a parent's decade and a child's.

POST

Post under the tags people already use

The day travels as #NationalSethDay and #SethDay, which are the two hashtags in play on January 31. Tag the Seth in your life rather than inventing a new one.

READ

Read the verse that names him

Genesis 4:25 gives the name and its reason in the same breath, and the lexicon entry behind it sets out the root the verse is playing on. Read the two together and the wordplay is hard to miss.

VISIT

Visit the Eastman fort paintings

The series hangs in the Capitol's first-floor west corridor, eight on the Senate side and nine on the House side. The Senate's history office tells the story of how they got there.

COMPARE

Compare the name across two national registers

The Office for National Statistics publishes its own ranked table of boys' names registered in England and Wales. Set it beside the American file to see where the name sits in each country.
Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing on record, so January 31 is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

14sources
8primary records
5independently dated
Primary records
Social Security Administration2026-08
National baby names data, names.zip (yob1880.txt to yob2025.txt)
Yearly national counts of every US baby name, 1880 through 2025.
View source
Social Security Administration
Popular Names by Decade: names of the 1960s
The agency's published table of the most common names of the 1960s.
View source
Office for National Statistics2025
Baby names in England and Wales: boys (2025)
Official ranked table of boys' names registered in England and Wales.
View source
Federal Register
Documents search API
Searchable index of every document published in the Federal Register.
View source
Sefaria
Genesis 4:25, Miqra according to the Masorah and the JPS Tanakh
The Hebrew of the verse that names Seth, with the JPS translators' footnote.
View source
National Inventors Hall of Fame
NIHF Inductee Seth Boyden
The inducting institution's record of the Newark inventor's work.
View source
United States Senate
Revisiting Seth Eastman's Military Fort Paintings After 150 Years
The Senate's account of the fort paintings that hang in the Capitol.
View source
USDA Forest Service
Mount Roosevelt Friendship Tower
Forest Service page on Seth Bullock and the tower he built.
View source
Additional coverage
Bible Hub
Strong's Hebrew 8352: Sheth
Lexicon entry for the Hebrew name, including the Brown-Driver-Briggs article.
View source
Behind the Name2026-05
Meaning, origin and history of the name Seth (1)
Origin, meaning and popularity history of the given name Seth.
View source
Behind the Name2020-11
Meaning, origin and history of the name Seth (2)
The separate Egyptian-mythology name that shares the English spelling.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Seth, Egyptian god of chaos and storms
Profile of the Egyptian god of the desert, storms and disorder.
View source
Today in Connecticut History2026-01-29
January 29: The Clock Stops for Seth Thomas
The Connecticut clockmaker's career and the town that took his name.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Seth Low, mayor of New York City
Biography of the Columbia president who became mayor of New York.
View source
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