Philetus
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Philetus is a Greek name meaning "beloved" (Biblical Names Compiled Database)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Philetus is a male given name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- GBUnited Kingdom
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Philetus is a Greek name meaning "beloved." In the Bible, he was a man in the early church who was criticized by the Apostle Paul for spreading false teachings. Due to this negative biblical association, the name is very rare in modern times.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Biblical Names Compiled Database
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Philetus is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
The name Philetus is derived from the Greek word Φίλητος (Philētos), meaning "beloved," "amiable," or "worthy of love".
as a nameBiblical Names Compiled Database
In English, Biblical name
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Philetus Swiftb. 1763USAmerican politician (1763-1828)
- Philetus Sawyerb. 1816USAmerican politician (1816–1900)
- Philetus Norrisb. 1821USSuperintendent of Yellowstone National Park (1821–1885)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Philetus come from?
- Philetus is a Greek name meaning "beloved." In the Bible, he was a man in the early church who was criticized by the Apostle Paul for spreading false teachings. Recorded by Biblical Names Compiled Database.
- Is Philetus a male or female name?
- Philetus is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- What are other forms of the name Philetus?
- In the etymology graph, Philetos is a form of the same name in other languages.
- What does the name Philetus mean?
- Recorded meaning: Philetus is a Greek name meaning "beloved."
- In which country does Philetus have the most bearers?
- Philetus is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Philetus?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/philetusThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Philetus”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.