Holiday Calendar

National Tim Day

Next celebratedMonday, December 28, 2026

Timothy held a place in America's top 100 boys' names for sixty-five unbroken years, from 1943 to 2007. Tim, the short form clipped out of it, is the one December 28 is named for.

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Last updated September 3, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEDecember 28
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

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

A listing-site observance, with no calendar tradition behind the date.

No founder, organization, or founding announcement for National Tim Day has been documented, and no year of first observance can be established. The day circulates through holiday listing sites and social posts.

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INTRO

Twelve European calendars honor this name on thirteen other dates

Twenty name days across Europe belong to this name, and December 28 is not one of them. Counting Behind the Name's name-day listing for every form of Timothy gives twenty entries in twelve countries, spread over thirteen separate calendar dates. National Tim Day falls on none of them.

Look up the date in those same calendars and the slot is already taken. Sweden keeps Benjamin that day, France keeps Gaspard, and Spain keeps Abel. Poland lists five names and none of them is a form of Timothy.

So the American day sits outside all of that. It takes the shape of a European name day and inherits none of the dates that shape came with.

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ORIGINS

Tim Day history

INTRODUCTION

The day carries the name of a convert from the Lycaonian city of Lystra, in Asia Minor. The Orthodox Church in America records that the Apostle Paul converted him, kept him as a constant companion, and later appointed him Bishop of Ephesus.

The same account has him killed for interrupting a procession. The pagans of Ephesus carried their idols through the city with songs and ceremony, and Timothy tried to halt them and preach against it. They beat him, dragged him along the ground, and stoned him.

CHAPTER 01

Why the name's days cluster in late January

The churches fix the name to a single week of the year. The Catholic Church in the United States keeps January 26 as the Memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, and the Orthodox Church in America commemorates the apostle on January 22.

The name-day calendars sit on the same ground. Nine of the twenty name days Behind the Name records for it fall in the five days from January 22 to January 26, in Greece, Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Denmark, Croatia, Italy, Spain and Austria.

CHAPTER 02

English speakers were late to the name

English took its time with it. E. G. Withycombe's Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names puts it flatly: Timothy "did not come into use in England until after the Reformation."

The English form acquired a feminine of its own. Withycombe's entry records the feminine Timothia at Burtonwood in Lancashire in 1702.

CHAPTER 03

The day itself leaves no trail

None of that reaches December 28. Nobody has claimed National Tim Day, no organization runs it, and no announcement survives that would fix when it was first kept.

What can be checked is the silence around it. The Federal Register carries no document naming the day, and in the Catholic calendar the date was already spoken for as the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Whoever put the name here left nothing behind.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Tim Day

Ancestry

Tims and Timms are not Greek at all. They are Old English.

Timothy comes from the Greek Timotheos, glossed as honouring God. Withycombe's dictionary sends the common surnames Tims and Timms somewhere else entirely, to an Old English name cognate with the Old German Thiemmo, which developed into Thim or Tim. Two unrelated names, one spelling.

Crossover

In five separate years American parents used it for daughters

Timothy sits in the Social Security Administration's girls' files in seventy-nine separate years, and it appeared inside the girls' top thousand in 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968 and 1970. In 1970 alone, 141 American girls were given the name. Its rank that year depends on which tie-breaking convention you apply, so the count is the honest figure to quote.

Norway

One country still keeps a name day for Tim itself

Behind the Name records a name day for the bare form Tim in exactly one place, Norway, on February 22. Statistics Norway counted 1,492 men and boys named Tim living there at the end of 2025, against 1,204 in 2013. The register covers names held by 200 or more people and counts everyone with a Norwegian national identity number.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Tim Day by the Numbers

1,084,192
US boys named Timothy since 1880
83,358
US boys named Tim since 1880
1,734
US boys named Timothy in 2025
37
US boys named Tim in 2025

TIMELINE

Timeline

A feminine form at Burtonwood

Withycombe's dictionary records the form Timothia occurring in that Lancashire village.

Timothy enters the US top 100

The name reached number 99 among American boys, its first year inside the hundred most common.

More than thirty thousand in a year

Social Security files record 30,783 American boys named Timothy, one of only two years the name cleared thirty thousand.

One boy in every sixty-one

The name reached its highest ever share of recorded American male births.

Tim leaves the top thousand

The short form appeared inside the thousand most common American boys' names for the last time.

A sixty-five year run ends

Timothy's sixty-fifth straight year inside the boys' top 100 was also its last.
Timothy has been used a good deal in Ireland (usually abbreviated to Tim) to represent the native Tadhgh.
E. G. WithycombeThe Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, third edition, 1977

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Tim Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Find out when the name is actually kept

Behind the Name's entry for Timothy links a name-day page for every form it indexes. Work through Tim, Timo, Timotej, Timoteo, Tymoteusz, Timotheus, Timotei and Timotheos and the thirteen date map assembles itself.

READ

Read the two letters written to Timothy

Two of Paul's epistles in the New Testament are addressed directly to him. They are the closest thing on paper to meeting the man the name commemorates.

LOOK

Look up a Tim in the birth data

The Social Security Administration's national name files run from 1880 to 2025 and are free to download. Find the year a Tim you know was born and see how many others were given the name.

ASK

Ask a Tim which name is on the birth certificate

The federal files count Tim and Timothy as separate names rather than folding one into the other, so each carries its own record back to 1880. The answer decides which of the two curves belongs to him.

READ

Read the dictionary entry that splits the name in two

Withycombe's Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names sits on the Internet Archive in full, and the Timothy entry is the shortest route to the name's whole tangled record.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Tim Day?

1 / 8

What does the Greek name Timotheos behind Timothy mean?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance and a normal working day, and the Federal Register carries no document naming it.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

10sources
7primary records
7independently dated
Primary records
Social Security Administration2025 data vintage
Popular Baby Names: Beyond the Top 1000 Names
The agency's national name files, one per year of birth from 1880 to 2025, listing every name given to five or more American babies. Every count and run length on this page was recomputed from that download.
View source
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops2026 liturgical calendar
Memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, Bishops
The bishops' own liturgical calendar entry for 26 January, which names the day the memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus in the Catholic calendar for the United States.
View source
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops2026 liturgical calendar
Feast of the Holy Innocents, Martyrs
The same calendar's entry for 28 December, which shows what that date already carries in the Catholic year.
View source
Orthodox Church in America
Apostle Timothy of the Seventy
The church's own life of the apostle, giving the 22 January commemoration, his origin in the Lycaonian city of Lystra, his appointment as Bishop of Ephesus, and the account of his death during a procession of idols.
View source
Statistics Norway2025 edition
Table 10501: Persons, by girls' or boys' name, contents and year
Norway's national name register, which counts living residents by first name and states its own threshold of 200 holders and its national identity number basis.
View source
Federal Registersearched September 2026
Full-text search for the phrase National Tim Day
The United States government's publication of record, searched for the exact phrase. It returns nothing, against a control search that returns dozens of documents for an observance that does have federal standing.
View source
Internet Archive1977 edition
E. G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, third edition
The full scanned text of Withycombe's dictionary, whose Timothy entry supplies the Reformation dating, the Old English Thiemmo line behind Tims and Timms, the Irish Tadhgh substitution, and the 1702 Timothia record at Burtonwood.
View source
Additional coverage
Behind the Nameupdated May 2026
Meaning, origin and history of the name Timothy
The reference entry for the name, giving its Greek elements, its forms in other languages, and links to the name-day page for each of those forms.
View source
Behind the Name
December 28 Name Days
The index of every name kept on 28 December in the fourteen national calendars the site covers, from Austria to Sweden.
View source
Behind the Name
Name Days for the name Tim
The name-day listing for the bare short form, which returns a single entry, Norway on 22 February.
View source
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