Holiday Calendar

National Caleb Day

Next celebratedSaturday, July 10, 2027

The likeliest root of Caleb is the Hebrew word for dog, which the King James translators met 32 times and never once softened. July 10 gives a day to a name the lexicons have still not finished translating.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJuly 10
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A July date with nobody's signature on it.

No documented founder or formal establishment record has been identified for National Caleb Day. It circulates on name-day listing sites and in social posts with a July 10 date, and no source explains why that date was chosen.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

A living name the reference works still cannot settle

National Caleb Day belongs to a name whose likeliest root is a word the King James translators never once softened. They met the Hebrew keleb 32 times and rendered it dog on every one.

Strong's Concordance will not commit any further than that. It files the name as perhaps a form of that word, or else from the same root in the sense of forcible.

So the day belongs to a name nobody has finished translating. The Jewish Encyclopedia goes further and reads the biblical Caleb as the ancestor of a clan, the Calebites. Because the name signifies dog, it says, the dog has been thought to be that clan's totem.

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ORIGINS

Caleb Day history

INTRODUCTION

The Caleb of the Hebrew Bible sits slightly outside the tribe he speaks for. Numbers and Joshua both call him Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenezite, and the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon notes that only one strand of the text treats him as a full Judahite.

He is also one of only two men of his generation who lived to enter Canaan. The other was Joshua, and Numbers 14:30 names them together: everyone else who walked out of Egypt was to die in the wilderness.

CHAPTER 01

Give me this mountain

Caleb was forty years old when Moses sent him out to spy the land, and the scouts who went with him came back and made the heart of the people melt. Forty-five years later he tells Joshua he is fourscore and five and still as strong as the day he left. Then he asks for the hill country anyway, and Joshua gives him Hebron.

CHAPTER 02

An English name after the Reformation

The name reached English readers through the Bible rather than the church calendar. Tyndale's Pentateuch, issued at Marburg in 1530, already carries it. Behind the Name records that Caleb came into English use after the Protestant Reformation, and that the Puritans took it to America.

CHAPTER 03

The first Caleb at Harvard

A Wampanoag student named Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck took a Harvard degree in 1665, and Harvard calls him the first Native American to graduate from the college. The charter of 1650 had promised the education of English and Indian youth alike. No likeness of him survives, so the portrait now hanging in Annenberg Hall is a conjectural one, painted long after his death.

CHAPTER 04

A name with a day and no author

American parents came close to letting the name go. It never dropped out of the birth records, but the whole of the 1890s passed with fewer than a hundred boys given it. The day itself has no trail of that kind: no record says who put National Caleb Day on July 10, or why.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Caleb Day

RECORDS

Only 471 male spellings have appeared in every American file since 1880.

Caleb appears in every one of the Social Security Administration's 146 annual name files, 1880 through 2025, without a single gap. Of the 45,481 male spellings the agency has ever published, only 471 managed that.

CURRENCY

It names living people, not a historical figure

The scout in Numbers is where the name comes from, not who the day is for. The American files list 5,217 boys given it in 2025 alone, and the day belongs to them and to every other Caleb.

SPELLING

It takes in the spellings the registers keep apart

Registers count strings, not names, so Kaleb is filed as an English variant of the same name and then tallied in a separate row. A day for the name covers both, where a popularity table has to choose.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Caleb Day by the Numbers

324,350
US boys listed as Caleb, 1880-2025
11,665
Boys named Caleb in 2002, the US peak
624
Boys named Caleb in England and Wales, 2025
35
Times the King James Bible prints Caleb

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Caleb Day

Three different men in the Bible share it

Strong's lists the name as belonging to three separate Israelites, not one. The scout is simply the famous one.

A Caleb put the name on Pepsi-Cola

Caleb Davis Bradham, a New Bern pharmacist, sold a fountain drink his friends called Brad's drink. In 1898 he changed its name to Pepsi-Cola, and his North Carolina biography says the reason is not known.

It has never reached the American top thirty

Caleb's best showing is 31st, set in 2009. Across 146 years of files it has never climbed a place higher.

American girls have been given it too

The name has appeared on the girls' side of the files in 45 separate years since 1980, 653 times in all. It has never come close to the boys' figures.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Caleb Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Read the chapters the name comes from

Numbers 13 and 14 carry the scouting mission and the verdict on it. Joshua 14 carries the moment an eighty-five year old asks Joshua for a mountain.

LOOK

Look up the name's whole curve in the files

The Social Security Administration publishes American name counts for every year back to 1880, free and searchable. Watching one name dip and climb back across a century is oddly absorbing.

MESSAGE

Message every Caleb in your phone at once

Search your contacts for the name and greet all of them together. A name day scales in a way a birthday never can.

PUT

Put the dog question to the table

The lexicons offer three answers to where the name comes from and settle on none of them. Put all three to the room and see which one the Calebs present would pick.

LOOK

Look at how Harvard remembers its first graduate

Harvard's own account of the Cheeshahteaumuck portrait sets out what is known and what the painter had to guess. It is a short read and an honest one.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Caleb Day?

1 / 9

Which Hebrew word does Strong's Concordance most likely derive the name Caleb from?

Answer

No, and no official or legal recognition of it has been found. A search of the Federal Register returns no federal document that mentions the day, so July 10 is an ordinary working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

14sources
6primary records
6independently dated
Primary records
U.S. Social Security Administration2026
Popular Baby Names
Annual counts and ranks for every American given name back to 1880.
View source
Office for National Statistics2026-07-09
Baby names for boys in England and Wales: 2025
The 2025 register of boys' first names for England and Wales.
View source
Blue Letter Bible
H3612 kaleb, Strong's Hebrew Lexicon
The lexicon entry for the name, with its hedged derivation and 35 King James occurrences.
View source
Blue Letter Bible
H3611 keleb, Strong's Hebrew Lexicon
The Hebrew word for dog, rendered dog in all 32 of its King James appearances.
View source
Project Gutenberg
The King James Version of the Bible
The full King James text, including the Numbers and Joshua passages about Caleb.
View source
Federal Register
Federal Register document search API
The searchable index of United States federal documents and proclamations.
View source
Additional coverage
JewishEncyclopedia.com1906
Caleb
The 1906 article on Caleb, including the reading of the Calebites as a dog-totem clan.
View source
Behind the Name2026-05-26
Meaning, origin and history of the name Caleb
The name's contested etymology, its English arrival and its filed variant spellings.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
King James Version
The 1611 translation and its long run as the standard English Bible.
View source
Encyclopaedia Britannica
William Tyndale
The translator whose Pentateuch was printed at Marburg in 1530.
View source
Harvard Gazette2010-12
Native American honored
Harvard on Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, its first Native American graduate, and his 2010 portrait.
View source
Harvard University
Portrait of a Native American Student, Digging Veritas
How the conjectural portrait in Annenberg Hall was researched and painted.
View source
Wikipedia
July 10 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
The Eastern Orthodox commemorations kept on July 10.
View source
NCpedia, State Library of North Carolina1979, revised 2023
Bradham, Caleb Davis
The New Bern pharmacist who renamed his fountain drink Pepsi-Cola in 1898.
View source
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