100 Thai Names for Boys, With Meanings and Namesakes

Thai boy names wear their meaning on the surface. Sak is power, chai is victory, det is might, and parents stack those pieces into a formal name that reads like a wish for the boy who gets it.

Below are 100 Thai names for boys, each with its meaning, a pronunciation respelling, the style it suits, and, where there is one, the Thai bearer who made it recognizable. Where U.S. birth records have something to say about a name, we say what they say.

One thing worth knowing first. The formal name on a Thai boy’s birth certificate is rarely what his friends call him. That job belongs to his nickname, and several entries here are nicknames that grew up into first names.

Five of the twenty names here that United States birth records track are plotted side by side. Each line is scaled to its own peak, so the shapes can be compared even though the counts are very different ⁽¹⁾. Imron is climbing fastest of the group, up about 217 percent across the last decade of births according to the same files. Tor shows the deepest dip and recovery, down to roughly a fifth of its 1965 rate by 1985 and back to about 2.3 times that low today. Kay is the long tail of a name that ranked 70th for American girls in 1941 and now goes to around 10 U.S. boys a year, while Tao and Deng have held steady.

How Do Thai Boy Names Work?

A Thai boy carries two names that do different jobs. The formal given name goes on his documents, comes before the family name, and is treated as the more important half of the pair. The nickname, or chue len, is one or two syllables, is given at birth, and is what almost everyone actually calls him, to the point that friends and co-workers may never learn the full legal name ⁽²⁾. Several entries above, Lek, Deng, Tao, Yai, Seua, Singto and Tor among them, are nicknames doing duty as first names, which is why they are so short.

Formal names are longer and older. They usually run three to four syllables and are chosen for their meaning, their letters, or their sound, and Thai parents commonly pick letters that suit the day of the week the child was born ⁽³⁾. Most of the vocabulary comes from Pali and Sanskrit, which entered Thai alongside Theravada Buddhism and earlier Brahmin influence, though Chinese, Malay, English and Japanese roots all appear too, and Arabic does as well through the Malay-Muslim south, which is where Faisol, Fikree and Ruslee come from.

How common are these names at home? Thai Interior Ministry register figures reported in 2012 counted about 240,000 men named Somchai, more than any other male given name in the country, followed by Somsak at roughly 230,000, Somporn at 210,000, Somboon at 170,400 and Prasert at 170,000 ⁽⁴⁾. Four of those five are on this list.

Two more things are worth knowing before you commit. Thai law will not let a family register a surname that already belongs to another family, which is why Thai last names run so long and why unrelated people almost never share one. And a given name is not permanent: Thai adults change theirs fairly often, usually after a run of bad luck or ill health, or to mark a turn in life.

FAQs