The name Aya has two different origins and meanings. In Arabic, it stands for ‘sign’, ‘miracle’ or ‘evidence’ and is an alternate description of Ayah. In Japanese, Aya means ‘colorful’ or ‘beautiful’.
Aya is a female first name.
The name Aya 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, Aya ranks 774. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Aya. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Aya.
The name Aya has two different origins and meanings. In Arabic, it stands for ‘sign’, ‘miracle’ or ‘evidence’ and is an alternate description of Ayah. In Japanese, Aya means ‘colorful’ or ‘beautiful’.
Aya was the name of... an Egyptian queen who lived in the 18th century BCE. So, this name has accompanied people for at least 3800 years.
Aya is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Aya cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #674 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2019. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Aya, 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, Aya 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 Aya was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
383 babies were named Aya in 2022 - that's 1 in 387,028 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Aya ranked 690 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
You may not know anyone named Aya, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 30 states are home to women and girls named Aya. (To be fair, 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 entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Aya living in one state or another. If your name is Aya and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Michigan, which has the most people named Aya relative to the population, you still have to ask 9,954 women and girls their names before you hear Aya as an answer just 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 only three letters, the name Aya is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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 Aya 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 Aya, you can simply say:
Apple
Yoyo
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Aya
Aya
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
A
Y
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.
A
Y
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. Aya sounds like this:
