Basil is a masculine first name but has increasingly been given to girls in recent years.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Basil is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 boys have been named Basil. In the SmartGenius ranking, Basil is #2,002 on the list of most common boys names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Basil.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Basil annualy. This means that there have been boys named Basil who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus men named Basil have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Basil even more than any other time: in 1897, it holds its present record at rank #303 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Basil was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Basil has never been ranked higher than #303. In 2022, he rivaled the 1,417 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 115 boys named Basil were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Basil were born, there have been 73 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter B is neither particularly common nor particularly rare as a first letter for boys' names: 4.2% of all common boys' names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of boys' names are J and A, while X and U are the least common initials of boys' names.
With five letters, the name Basil is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five 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.
Thus, it follows that if 4.2% of all boys' names start with a B, this initial letter occurs about as often as all 26 letters on average. And maybe interesting to know: Brian is the boys’ name starting with B, which is the most common of all.
If your name is Basil 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 Basil, you can simply say:
Butterfly
Apple
Sun
Igloo
Lion
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Basil
Basil
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
B
A
S
I
L
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.
B
A
S
I
L
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. Basil sounds like this:
