Lyric is from the Greek lyrikos ("of the lyre") — referring to verse meant to be sung. As a given name, Lyric is a modern American word-name that surged in the 1990s alongside Harmony, Melody, and Cadence. A top-500 US baby name since 1998, peaking at #406 in 2007. Lyric Ross (born 2003) — *American actress; played Deja, the foster-then-adopted daughter of Randall and Beth Pearson on NBC's This Is Us (2017-2022) — the show received 39 Primetime Emmy Award nominations including Best Drama Series, and her performance is widely cited as one of the most-acclaimed young-actor performances of the 2010s. Critics' Choice Award nomination (2020). Lyric Bent is male (Canadian actor). Lyric McHenry (1992-2018) — American filmmaker. Lyric Joi — American author. "Lyric" as a given name first entered the US top-1000 in 1998 and has steadily climbed through the 21st century, reflecting the post-2000s American naming trend of unisex word-names (Sonnet, Story, Verse, Cadence, Melody). Sonnet, Story, and Verse are all in the library — Lyric completes the modern poetic-name family. Lyric* also functions as a unisex name; in some 21st-century US registries it appears for boys at about 30% the rate of girls.
Featured throughout 21st-century American culture and naming trends.
Lyric does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Lyric reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.