Bethel is a female first name. In some cases it's also given to boys.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Bethel is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 girls have been named Bethel. In the SmartGenius ranking, Bethel is #2,510 on the list of most common girls names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Bethel.
Bethel is not one of the particularly popular names, in fact in some of the last 143 years it has been given so infrequently that it doesn't even show up in our statistics (here a name is only recorded in those years in which it was given to newborns at least five times). This was, for example, most recently the case in 1995, where the name Bethel was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Bethel and were born in the USA in 1995 please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the last century, Bethel even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1914, it ranked on position 524 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Bethel was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Even though the popularity of the name Bethel has fluctuated in the past and there were years when the name was almost not chosen at all by expectant parents, it has without question arrived in the 21st century. In 2022, the name was given a remarkable 41 times by young parents to their newborn daughters and thus landed at #3,037 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular girls' names. Nevertheless, the name is still so rare that the 41 girls named Bethel, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is most likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children who turn around when someone calls 'Bethel'.
You may not know anyone named Bethel, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 29 states are home to women and girls named Bethel. (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 Bethel living in one state or another. If your name is Bethel 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 Kentucky, which has the most people named Bethel relative to the population, you still have to ask 10,664 women and girls their names before you hear Bethel as an answer just once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: 3.2% of all common girls' names in the US begin with a B. This means that B as the first letter for girls' names is neither particularly common nor rare. The most common first letters of girls' names are A, S and M, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of girls' names.
With six letters, the name Bethel 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.
Thus, if 3.2% of all girls’ names start with a B, this initial letter is slightly less common than all other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are girls' names with B that are quite common in the U.S., the most common at present is Barbara.
If your name is Bethel 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 Bethel, you can simply say:
Butterfly
Elephant
Tiger
Hat
Elephant
Lion
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Bethel
Bethel
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
B
E
T
H
E
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
E
T
H
E
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. Bethel sounds like this:
