Aliyah is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Aliyah 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, Aliyah ranks 159. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 12 were named Aliyah. In the entire USA, approximately 44,123 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Aliyah. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
The first name Aliyah is derived from the name Aliya and is Arabic in origin. It means ‘the high, the excellent, the exalted’. With the emphasis on the last a, the name is of Neo-Hebrew origin and means, among other things, ‘ascent’, ‘pilgrimage’ or denotes the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Aliyah is the... the name for the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to the modern State of Israel. Since 1950, the Israeli parliament gives all diaspora Jews, as well as their children and grandchildren, the right to relocate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship.
Aliyah is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Aliyah cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #127 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2011. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Aliyah, for there were many years in which not a single parent chose this first name for their daughter. Although it also has never been in the top 100 of most popular first names, Aliyah seems to have been in vogue for a while, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Aliyah was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
1,304 babies were named Aliyah in 2022 - that's 1 in 113,675 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Aliyah ranked 219 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
The name Aliyah may not be in the top rankings of the most popular girls’ names, but it is one of the few female given names, along with only 536 others, that can be found in every single state in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and from California to New York. Of course, the name occurs more frequently in some states than in others – and Aliyah is apparently especially popular in Nevada. Although the name is not one of the top 100 most popular women’s names here either, one in 1,002 women in Nevada is called Aliyah. In total, that’s 446 women who feel addressed when the name Aliyah is shouted loudly across Nevada and who ensure that their name makes it to #264 in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common female names in this nice state. If you asked all women in the entire U.S. for their first name, you would hear Aliyah as the answer a total of 44,117 times. This places Aliyah at #554 in our SmartGenius statistics for the most popular women’s names in the whole of the USA. This is true for all currently living women across all states and age groups – the recent popularity of the name Aliyah as a baby name is, of course, a bit different, as you can see from the statistics above.
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 six letters, the name Aliyah is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. 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 Aliyah 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 Aliyah, you can simply say:
Apple
Lion
Igloo
Yoyo
Apple
Hat
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Aliyah
Aliyah
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
A
L
I
Y
A
H
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
L
I
Y
A
H
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. Aliyah sounds like this:
