Anthony: A Classic Name Still Earning Its Place in 2026

My husband Marco and I have a whiteboard in our kitchen. It’s been there since December, covered in names written in blue marker, crossed out in red, with asterisks and question marks drifting around like a very high-stakes Scrabble game. We’re due in late June, and somewhere between debating whether Eliot carries too much literary baggage and whether Beckett is trying too hard, Anthony appeared — and stayed.

It appeared because of a Tuesday afternoon last November. I was cleaning out my late uncle’s apartment in Dorchester with my mother. His name was Anthony Rosario, and he passed in September after a short illness. He was the kind of man who remembered your birthday without a phone reminder, kept a notebook of things to look up later, and made the best Sunday gravy within a three-mile radius of his building. Pulling his books off the shelves — worn Camus paperbacks, a signed copy of Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, a stack of Red Sox programs from the ’80s — I kept seeing his name in the front pages. Anthony Rosario. His handwriting was cramped and confident.

I didn’t say anything to Marco right away. I just added it to the whiteboard with a single asterisk. He came home, saw it, and said, “Yeah.” That was the whole conversation. Some names carry their own argument.

What Anthony Actually Means

The meaning assigned to Anthony — priceless, or of inestimable worth — feels almost too good to be true, the kind of meaning a proud grandparent would invent. But it’s genuinely the standard translation, and the nuance behind it is worth sitting with. The name doesn’t mean valuable in a monetary sense. It means beyond valuation. Something you couldn’t put a price on if you tried.

The etymology, though, is fascinatingly murky. Anthony derives from the Latin Antonius, the name of a distinguished Roman gens (family clan). The Latin itself may reach back to Etruscan roots, which makes the precise meaning hard to pin down with certainty. Some scholars have connected it to the Greek anthos, meaning flower — a reading that shows up in medieval texts — but most modern etymologists treat this as folk etymology, a pleasing story layered onto a name that predates it.

What’s clear is that Antonius was a name of considerable weight in Roman society long before it crossed into the Christian tradition and became Anthony. It belonged to consuls, generals, and eventually saints. The meaning “priceless” emerged as the name traveled through medieval Europe and accumulated theological significance — a name fit for someone irreplaceable, set apart.

Where the Name Comes From

The story of Anthony as a given name runs roughly two thousand years, and it changes character every few centuries. In Roman antiquity, Marcus Antonius — Mark Antony — was one of the most powerful men in the world, Julius Caesar’s ally and Cleopatra’s famous counterpart. The name carried the weight of empire.

Christianity transformed it. Saint Anthony of Padua, born in Lisbon in 1195, became one of the most beloved figures in the Catholic world — the patron saint of lost things, among much else. His name became widespread across Catholic Europe: Antonio in Italy and Spain, Antoine in France, Anton in Germany and the Slavic countries. By the time the name crossed the English Channel and settled into English as Anthony, it had been carried by popes, kings, explorers, and mystics for centuries. [Link: Catholic baby names]

In England, the spelling Antony (without the H) was standard for a long time — Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra uses it that way — and the H crept in during the Renaissance, likely influenced by a false Greek connection to anthos. The H stuck, and now Anthony is the dominant English-language form, while Antony reads as a considered British variant.

How Popular Is Anthony Right Now

Anthony currently sits at #44 on the SSA’s national ranking for boys — solidly in the top 50, which means roughly one in every hundred or so baby boys born in the United States this year will be named Anthony. That’s not rare, but it’s not oversaturated either. You won’t have three Anthonys in a kindergarten class.

The decade-by-decade picture is interesting. The name was given to approximately 213,532 boys in the 1980s and peaked at around 216,982 in the 1990s — a high-water mark that reflects the name’s deep roots in both Latin American communities and Italian-American households, both of which were naming heavily from tradition during that era. The 2000s saw a modest decline to roughly 192,285, and the 2010s dropped more substantially to about 112,268. The 2020s figure so far — around 33,035 through the first part of the decade — reflects both the shorter timeframe and a continued softening, though the current #44 rank suggests it remains genuinely popular rather than fading.

The practical takeaway: if you’re in a city with a large Latino or Italian-American population, Anthony will feel familiar without feeling dated. It has that rare quality of a name that transcends demographic clusters — it belongs equally to the kid from East Boston and the kid from suburban Georgia.

Famous Anthonys Worth Knowing

The name has been carried by people across wildly different fields, which tells you something about its versatility.

Anthony Hopkins — The Welsh actor has won two Academy Awards, including for his chilling portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and remains one of the most respected screen presences of his generation.

Anthony Bourdain — Chef, memoirist, and television host who fundamentally changed how Americans think about food, travel, and who gets to tell stories; his book Kitchen Confidential is still essential reading.

Anthony Davis — The Los Angeles Lakers’ All-Star big man is one of the most dominant two-way players in the NBA, a three-time All-NBA selection known for his length and versatility.

Saint Anthony of Padua — The 13th-century Franciscan friar and Doctor of the Church whose feast day (June 13) is still celebrated across Catholic communities worldwide, and whose intercession for finding lost items remains one of the most widely practiced Catholic folk prayers.

Marc Anthony — Born Marco Antonio Muñiz, the Grammy-winning salsa and Latin pop singer has sold more than 12 million albums and remains one of the best-selling tropical salsa artists of all time.

Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) — The Roman general and statesman whose alliance with Julius Caesar and romance with Cleopatra became the stuff of Western literature and drama for two millennia — Shakespeare included.

Variants and Nicknames

One of Anthony’s practical strengths is how cleanly it translates across languages and cultures while staying clearly itself. [Link: Italian baby names for boys]

The most common international variants:

• Antonio — Italian and Spanish; warm, musical, widely used on its own
• Antoine — French; elegant without being fussy
• Anton — German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Slavic; crisp, modern-feeling
• Antony — the original English spelling without the H; still used in the UK
• Antonino — Sicilian/Italian diminutive; affectionate and distinctive
• Antal — Hungarian variant, rarely seen outside Hungary

Nicknames in common use:

• Tony — by far the most prevalent; feels retro in a good way, warm and unpretentious
• Ant — casual and sharp, especially popular in British English
• Toni — works as a softer nickname, increasingly gender-neutral
• Tone — informal, used in close circles

The Tony nickname in particular has its own cultural weight — Tony Stark, Tony Montana, Tony Soprano. It’s a nickname with a biography.

Why This Name, In the End

There’s something I keep coming back to when I look at that asterisked name on the whiteboard. My uncle Anthony Rosario wasn’t famous. He didn’t have a Wikipedia page or a street named after him. But he was, in every way the etymology promises, of inestimable worth — to my mother, to our family, to every person who sat at his kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon. Naming a son after someone like that doesn’t feel like nostalgia. It feels like a continuation.

I also just like how it sounds. Anthony. It has weight without being heavy. It ages well — it fits a newborn and a seventy-year-old with equal grace. And when Marco and I say it out loud, standing in the kitchen, talking to a due date on the calendar, it feels like a name with room in it. Room for whoever our kid is going to be.