Papa is a first name for boys.
Recently, the name Papa has been given only a handful of times a year and is therefore particularly rare, at least in the US. In recent years, not even one boy in 100,000 has been named Papa. That means that a boy named Papa is exceptional and may not meet another person with the same name his whole life. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Papa.
Meeting a man or boy named Papa is something really special. Out of all 50 states, men and boys named Papa can be found in only : . No other state currently has residents named Papa. However, we must admit that a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s quite possible that there are still a few men and boys called Papa living in one state or another. (If your name is Papa and you live outside of , we’d really appreciate it if you’d let us know so we can refine our statistics even further.) Either way, the name is quite rare. The best chance of meeting a Papa is in New York, as there live more men and boys with this name in relation to the population than in any other state. But even here in New York, only 0.00016% of all male residents are called Papa – that’s just one in 607,910! And even in all these states combined there are only a total of 21 men going by that name. So, if your name is Papa, chances are you will never meet another man bearing that extraordinary first name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter P is quite rare as an initial letter for boys' names: only 1.5% of all common boys' names in the US begin with P, which means that this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. But P is by no means the rarest initial. While X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names, the most common first letters of boys' names are J, A and D.
With four letters, the name Papa is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
From this follows that if 1.5% of all boys' names begin with a P, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Incidentally, of the comparatively few boys' names that begin with a P, Paul is currently the most common.
If your name is Papa and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Papa, you can simply say:
Pig
Apple
Pig
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Papa
Papa
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
P
A
P
A
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
P
A
P
A
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Papa sounds like this:
