Sebastian

Sebastian comes from the Latin Sebastianus, meaning a man from Sebaste, a city in Asia Minor at what is now Sivas in Turkey. The city’s name comes from the Greek sebastos, “venerable” or “august”, which was the Greek version of the Roman title Augustus.

The name spread through Saint Sebastian, an early Christian martyr in Rome. According to tradition he was shot with arrows, survived, and was later killed on the emperor’s orders. Renaissance painters loved the subject, usually showing him tied to a tree or column and pierced with arrows. Shakespeare used the name twice, for Viola’s twin brother in Twelfth Night and for a scheming nobleman in The Tempest.

Sebastian was rare in Ireland for decades and began to climb in the mid-2000s. The most boys were given the name in 2014, with 91, and its best rank came in 2017, at number 80. Since 2018 the CSO has counted Sebastián, with an accent, separately; the figures here combine both.