Tabitha

About Tabitha

Tabitha is an Aramaic name meaning “gazelle.” Its best-known early bearer appears in the New Testament, where she is also called Dorcas, the Greek equivalent of the same name. The full form has three syllables, TAB-ih-thuh, while Tabby and Tibby provide much shorter familiar versions.

A name in two languages

Tabitha and Dorcas look and sound quite different, but their relationship comes from meaning: both name the gazelle, one in Aramaic and the other in Greek. That makes Dorcas a translated counterpart rather than a nickname or a spelling variation.

Tabatha is a variant spelling, and Tabea is a German relative. Tabby and Tibby are established diminutives. Tabitha’s first-syllable stress remains easy to hear even with its longer ending; the nickname Tabby keeps that opening and replaces the rest with an ee sound.

English use of the biblical name grew after the Protestant Reformation. Its history therefore reaches beyond the twentieth-century American period in which it became most familiar in birth records.

Tabitha in Acts

The New Testament story gives the name a memorable human setting. In Acts 9, the women mourning Dorcas show Peter clothing she had made. Their grief is expressed through the tangible work she left behind, bringing an ordinary domestic detail into the account.

Peter sends the others out, kneels to pray, and addresses her as Tabitha. She opens her eyes, and he helps her up before presenting her alive to the people gathered there. The passage uses both Tabitha and Dorcas for the same woman, preserving the two-language identity that remains part of the name’s history.

Television and fiction

For many English-speaking viewers, Tabitha also recalls the daughter in the television comedy Bewitched. This gives the name a twentieth-century fictional connection alongside its much older religious one. Tabatha is also associated with the character’s name, but the two spellings have separate entries in American statistics.

Writer Tabitha King provides another cultural connection. She completed Candles Burning from a manuscript left unfinished by Michael McDowell when he died in 1999. The novel follows Calley, also called Calliope Dakin, after her father’s violent death and her move with her mother to Pensacola Beach.

A mysterious house and Calley’s unusual ability to hear things give the story a supernatural atmosphere. King’s work on the unfinished manuscript makes this a particular literary collaboration, rather than simply another appearance of a familiar first name.

American popularity

Tabitha’s strongest American year was 1978, with 2,309 girls and a rank of 126th. In 1980, it was still given to 1,788 girls; by 2000, that number was 992.

The decline continued to 465 births in 2010 and 171 in 2025, when Tabitha ranked 1,308th. Its current rarity contrasts with its much greater visibility among girls born in the late 1970s.

How popular is Tabitha?

In 2025, Tabitha ranked #1,308 among girls in the United States, with 171 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for girls in 1880; its largest annual count was 2,309 in 1978. Rankings count each spelling separately. They describe national use, so local familiarity can differ. The popularity chart shows whether the name has remained common, returned after a quieter period, or risen recently.