Holiday Calendar

National Tony Day

Next celebratedThursday, May 6, 2027

Tony has been a Broadway award, an English word for a fool and, in Chile, a circus clown. May 6 sets all that aside for the people who actually answer to it.

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Last updated September 5, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEMay 6
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

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

One story credits Tony Blair's birthday; only aggregators carry it.

National Tony Day travels through holiday-listing sites and social posts each May 6, and the competing accounts of how it began are unsourced and disagree with each other; one credits the date to Tony Blair's birthday and appears only on aggregators. No founder or establishment record stands behind any of them.

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

Two English words wear the same spelling and share no ancestor

National Tony Day honors a name that English refused to leave alone. Look up tony in Merriam-Webster and the entry is a compliment: marked by an aristocratic or high-toned manner or style. That word has nothing to do with anyone called Tony.

The Oxford English Dictionary keeps the two apart, in separate entries with separate ancestors. The noun built from the personal name is the older by more than two centuries. The adjective was built instead from the word tone.

The older word was not flattering. A tony was a fool, and English used it that way for well over a century.

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ORIGINS

Tony Day history

INTRODUCTION

John Dryden's All for Love was first performed in 1677. Its prologue describes the hero as a pattern and companion fit "For all the keeping Tonies of the pit."

That is the older of the two words at work, the noun English built out of the personal name. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest record of it comes from the writing of Edmund Gayton, in 1654. Wiktionary glosses the noun as a simpleton and files it as archaic.

CHAPTER 01

The name that became a word

The name had become a stock label, the kind that stands in for anybody at all. Writing for Oxford University Press, the etymologist Anatoly Liberman puts it plainly: Tony "was not a rare name for 'any person'." He groups it with Tom, Dick and Harry.

Roger L'Estrange reached for the plural in his Fables of Aesop in 1692. He warned against people who "trifle and play the Tonies betwixt Jest and Earnest."

CHAPTER 02

A second tony, from somewhere else

Then a different word appeared, spelled the same way and meaning close to the opposite. Its earliest evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from an Iowa newspaper, the Sioux City Daily Journal, in 1873.

This one was never built from the name. The dictionary derives it from tone and marks it as American English. It is the one that survived.

CHAPTER 03

The day itself

National Tony Day sits on top of all this and explains none of it. Its date is fixed and the listing sites all carry it, yet no organization claims it and no announcement launched it.

The stories that fill the gap do not survive a check, and there are several of them. They disagree about the year and about who was involved, and none of them leads to a document. What the day does have is the name, and the name has been on paper for more than three centuries.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Tony Day

LANGUAGE

In Chilean Spanish, a tony is a clown.

In Chile and Argentina a tony is a circus clown, an ordinary noun recorded by the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. The same entry marks it masculine and lists Uruguay as a rarer third country.

RECORD

Tony has its own line in the name tables

The US Social Security Administration lists Tony separately in its published decade tables, where it ranked among the most-used boys' names for six straight decades. It dropped out of those tables after the 1990s.

NAMING

A Tony whose documents say Anthony

Tony Blair served as British prime minister for a decade, and Britannica gives his full name as Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. The day covers both kinds of Tony, the registered one and the shortened one.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Tony Day by the Numbers

204,636
Tonys in US name tables, 1940s-1990s
51
Best US decade rank for Tony
~0.1
Uses of tony per million words

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

The word simpleton was built from the name, as simple Tony.

The truth

Francis Grose's 1811 slang dictionary defined it exactly that way, and a folk-etymology writer later backed the idea with a satirical 1772 verse. Modern references reject it: the Oxford Etymologist calls the conjecture ingenious and says it can hardly be upheld.

The myth

The Tony Awards are named after a man called Tony.

The truth

They are named for Antoinette Perry, the wartime leader of the American Theatre Wing, and Tony was her nickname. The Wing's own history records that the awards began in 1947 and were named for her.

The myth

Name days like this one were set up by the United Nations and the World Health Organization in 1998.

The truth

The UN's own register of international days and weeks contains no name day of any kind, and no entry at all on 6 May. The WHO campaign list is entirely health campaigns.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Tony Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Read the 1677 prologue for yourself

All for Love is in the public domain and free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The line about the Tonies sits early on, before the play begins.

ASK

Ask a Tony whether Tony is their full name

Some were registered under it and some shortened Anthony to get there. The difference never shows in conversation, which is half the fun of asking.

WRITE

Write both definitions on one card

Put the archaic noun on one side and the modern adjective, tonier and toniest included, on the other. It is the whole history of the name in two lines.

TRACK

Track the name through the government tables

The Social Security Administration publishes a ranked list of the most-used names for every decade it covers. Look up the decade a Tony you know was born in and see where the name sat.

THROW

Throw the smallest possible party

A name day honors one person by name, so the guest list writes itself. Keep it to the Tonys and whoever will sit through the etymology.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Tony Day?

1 / 8

The English adjective tony, meaning stylish, comes from which word?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no official status located, and a phrase search of the US Federal Register returns nothing for it, so it is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

14sources
10primary records
5independently dated
Primary records
Oxford English Dictionary
tony, adj. & n.2
Dates the English adjective meaning stylish or aristocratic to 1873, marks it as US English, derives it from tone plus -y, names the Sioux City Daily Journal in Iowa as the source of the earliest evidence, and gives its modern frequency as about 0.1 occurrences per million words.
View source
Oxford English Dictionary
Tony, n.1
A separate and older entry, dated from 1654, for the English noun formed from the personal name, with two senses of which one is obsolete and the earliest evidence attributed to Edmund Gayton.
View source
Merriam-Webster2026-08-06
tony
The current American dictionary entry defining tony as marked by an aristocratic or high-toned manner or style, with the inflections tonier and toniest and the variant spelling toney.
View source
Project Gutenberg1678
All for Love; Or, The World Well Lost: A Tragedy, by John Dryden
The full public-domain text of the play first performed in 1677, including the prologue couplet aimed at the keeping Tonies of the pit.
View source
Asociacion de Academias de la Lengua Espanola2010
Diccionario de americanismos, entry tony
The pan-Hispanic academies' record of tony as a masculine noun meaning payaso, a clown, in Chile and Argentina, and more rarely in Uruguay.
View source
U.S. Social Security Administration
Top names of the 1960s
SSA's published rank and count for the 200 most-used names of each decade, the source for Tony's six-decade run, its peak rank of 51 in the 1960s, and its later absence from the tables.
View source
United Nations
List of International Days and Weeks
The UN's complete official register of international days and weeks, which contains no name day of any kind and no entry on 6 May.
View source
World Health Organization
Campaigns
WHO's own list of the campaigns it runs, every one of them a health campaign and none of them a name day.
View source
The American Theatre Wing's Tony Awards
Antoinette Perry
The rights holder's own history of the awards, recording that they began in 1947 and were named for Antoinette Perry, born in Denver in 1888.
View source
Words from Old Books1811
Simpleton, from Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
The complete 1811 entry deriving simpleton as an abbreviation of simple Tony or Anthony, a foolish fellow, which is what a period slang lexicographer believed about the word.
View source
Additional coverage
OUPblog, Oxford University Press2013-09-11
No simplistic etymology of simpleton
Anatoly Liberman's assessment rejecting the simple Tony derivation of simpleton, quoting the satirical 1772 verse offered as evidence for it and noting that Tony was a common stock name for any person.
View source
Wiktionary
tony
Splits the English word into two etymologies, the archaic noun meaning a simpleton derived from the name, with dated quotations from Dryden and L'Estrange, and the adjective derived from tone.
View source
Online Etymology Dictionary
tony
Records the masculine name as short for Anthony, dates the adjective to 1877 as American slang from tone plus -y, and dates the award sense to 1947 from the nickname of Antoinette Perry.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Tony Blair
Gives the full name of the British prime minister who served from 1997 to 2007 as Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
View source
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