Bill is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Bill is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 boys have been named Bill. In the SmartGenius ranking, Bill is #2,757 on the list of most common boys names. In the entire USA, approximately 153,992 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Bill. That is 0.05 % of all living Americans.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Bill is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Bill for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Bill is therefore one of only 442 boys’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Bill is a very special name that peaked in popularity some time ago in the 20th century. Placed at #57 Bill easily made it into the top 100 boys' names of our SmartGenius statistics for male first names and has never been more popular than back in 1932.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Bill was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 26 babies were named Bill in the USA in 2022, ranking it at #3,562 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2021, when it was only ranked #3,894 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 22 boys were named Bill.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Bill is one of them. However, Bill is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Oklahoma seem to particularly fancy this name – the 7,766 men called Bill who live here are 0,348% of all male residents and push their name up to #57 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Oklahoma. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 153,992 people with the name Bill. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Bill on position 208 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat 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 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 four letters, the name Bill is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four 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 Bill 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 Bill, you can simply say:
Butterfly
Igloo
Lion
Lion
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Bill
Bill
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
B
I
L
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
I
L
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. Bill sounds like this:
