What is Sam short for?
Sam is short for Samuel, Samir, Sameer, Hesam and Samantha. In 2025, 428 boys and 24 girls in the United States were given Sam as their full name, with nothing longer behind it, according to Social Security records.
The meeting point
A quadruple: four unrelated names land on the same three letters.
Samuel · short for Samuel: "name of God" or "God has heard"; the scholarship hedges, so we hedge (source)
Samir · Arabic Samir, from samara, "to talk into the evening": a companion in evening conversation (source)
Sameer · Sanskrit Samir/Sameer, समीर, "wind": a completely different name that happens to be spelled the same (source)
Hesam · Persian Hesam, "sword": Sam Asghari was born Hesam (source)
The names behind Sam
Each count is the number of children given that name in the United States in 2025, from US Social Security records. A name given to fewer than five children in a year is left out of the published file.