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.
If you’re looking for someone named Papa, you might want to head to New York. Why New York of all places? Well, simply because, according to official statistics, there are no men or boys named Papa living in any other state. However, we have to admit that a first name is only listed in the official statistics of a state if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it may well be that there are still a few men and boys named Papa living in one state or another. But, in any case the name is extremely rare. (If your name happens to be Papa and you live outside of New York, we would be very grateful if you could let us know so that we can refine our statistics even further). By the way, even in New York, the name Papa is not really that common – there are only 21 men and boys with this name living there right now, which is not more than 0.00017% of all male residents of New York – so if you are one of them, you can rightly say that you are someone very special!
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:
