Ben is a short form of a lot of names like Benjamin, Benson, Benedict and Bennett. Apart from English-speaking countries, it is also very popular in Germany and the Netherlands.
Ben is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Ben 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 boys names, Ben ranks 682. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Ben. In the entire USA, approximately 70,801 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Ben. That is 0.02 % of all living Americans.
Ben is a short form of a lot of names like Benjamin, Benson, Benedict and Bennett. Apart from English-speaking countries, it is also very popular in Germany and the Netherlands.
Did you know? Ben is also a Chinese surname.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Ben is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Ben for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Therefore, Ben is one of the 442 boys' names, that have been given to newborn sons every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Ben is a very special name that peaked in popularity over 100 years ago in the 19th century, ranking in the top 100 boys' names in our SmartGenius first name statistics: Placed at #42 Ben has never been more popular than back in 1889.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ben was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 325 babies were named Ben in the USA in 2022, ranking it #715 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2020, when it was only ranked at #716 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics - back then 310 boys were named Ben.
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 only three letters, the name Ben 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.
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 Ben 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 Ben, you can simply say:
Butterfly
Elephant
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ben
Ben
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
B
E
N
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
E
N
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. Ben sounds like this:
