The English name Abby is a diminutive of Abigail, that comes from the Hebrew name Avigayil meaning ‘my father is joy’. It is composed of ‘av’ meaning ‘father’ and ‘gil’ meaning ‘joy’.
Abby is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Abby isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all girls names, Abby ranks 411. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 5 were named Abby. In the entire USA, approximately 57,351 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Abby. That is 0.02 % of all living Americans.
Everyone knows her, everyone loves her and still she’s different from the mainstream: Abby occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the more than 50,000 different female first names that occur in the USA, just 537 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Abby is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Abby is not one of those names that one encounters in every neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, is noticeable and special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 57,337 women and girls of all generations bear the name Abby – that is one in 2,689. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in South Dakota, where one in 1,101 women and girls is called Abby, while it is particularly rare in Hawaii, where you have to ask an average of 88,259 women for their name to get Abby as an answer once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter A is the most popular first letter for girls’ names. 11.8% of all common girls’ names in the US start with this letter. The second most common first letter in girls' names is S.
With four letters, the name Abby 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.
That means that if 11.8% of all girls' names start with an A, this initial letter occurs over three times as often as all other letters on average. And, by the way, of all the girls' names that begin with the letter A, the name Ashley is the most common.
If your name is Abby 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 Abby, you can simply say:
Apple
Butterfly
Butterfly
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Abby
Abby
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
A
B
B
Y
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.
A
B
B
Y
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. Abby sounds like this:
