Toby
In Poland this is a genuinely rare name: fewer than a hundred people carry it, and most Poles have never met one. It comes from Hebrew and reads as a small statement of faith, "Yahweh is good", carried almost entirely by men.
Toby Pronunciation
Toby is pronounced TO-bih (/ˈtɔbɨ/).
What Toby means
Where Toby comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Toby began as a short form of Tobias, the English rendering of Hebrew Toviyah. The name breaks into two pieces, tov, meaning good, and Yah, a form of the divine name. Put together they say that Yahweh is good. That reading sits behind every Toby, even where nobody stops to translate it.
The fuller name reached English through the Book of Tobit, where young Tobias travels with the angel Raphael and heals his father's blindness. By the Middle Ages Toby had loosened from the scripture and stood on its own. English tradition even handed the name to a dog, the Toby of the Punch and Judy show.
Today an English Toby is simply Toby, rarely expanded back to Tobias on the forms they sign. A Polish child registered as Toby carries the same short meaning, Bóg jest dobry, whether or not the family reads Hebrew. The Hebrew tov is still in there.
How many people are named Toby
1 in 333534 men in Poland is named Toby. 70 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #4317 among male names.
Toby's popularity over time
Fewer than 2 boys were given the name in 2025. It has been stable for a decade.
Toby as a middle name
Toby is a first name for 70 men in Poland and a middle name for another 12, an 85/15 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 2863rd, between Thadeus (12) and Trinh (12).
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#2861 Thabo12
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#2862 Thadeus12
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#2863 Toby12
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#2864 Trinh12
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#2865 Tulio12