Meaning and history
Possibly derived from Greek τίθημι (tithemi), meaning “to set” or “to place,” Theseus was a heroic king of Athens in Greek mythology and the son of Aethra, either by Aegeus or by the god Poseidon. In legend, when King Minos of Crete required Athens to send seven boys and seven girls every seven years to be fed to the Minotaur, Theseus volunteered to go, killed the creature in the Labyrinth, and escaped with the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who gave him a sword and a ball of string. He was later a central character in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), which concerns his impending marriage to the Amazon queen Hippolyta, and he reappears in The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613).
20062006: no US SSA record for this spelling
2007: no US SSA record for this spelling
2008: no US SSA record for this spelling
2009: no US SSA record for this spelling
2010: 5 births, rank #12,231
20112011: 5 births, rank #12,287
2012: 41 births, rank #2,869
2013: 31 births, rank #3,405
2014: 43 births, rank #2,754
2015: 44 births, rank #2,722
20162016: 35 births, rank #3,230
2017: 29 births, rank #3,678
2018: 24 births, rank #4,226
2019: 31 births, rank #3,571
2020: 23 births, rank #4,275
20212021: 33 births, rank #3,427
2022: 24 births, rank #4,303
2023: 25 births, rank #4,220
2024: 30 births, rank #3,693
20252025: 19 births, rank #5,045
In 2025, 19 babies were recorded with the name Theseus, ranking #5,045 among boys.