Bray is a male first name. In some cases it's also given to girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Bray 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 Bray. In the SmartGenius ranking, Bray is #3,346 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 Bray.
In fact, the name Bray did not fit the trend of the last century. Young parents in the 2000s began to change that a bit. After several years of not being given at all (or less than 5 times, because that's the number required for a name to appear in the statistics), Bray seemed to be more popular than ever in 2014. Although the name never ranked higher than #2,607, 40 parents chose it that year, making it a potential new rising star on the horizon of beautiful and rare names. If your name is Bray, you are well on your way to becoming en vogue.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Bray was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, expectant parents chose the yet rare name Bray a few times. Among all newborn boys it ranked #2,694 - with a total of 40 baby boys. This means, as you can see above, that the name is still more common than it was most time of the last century, when it supposedly didn't appear at all for many years - giving boys with this first name a sheen of something particularly contemporary and special.
If you ever wanted to meet a boy or man named Bray, you have limited options – because boys with this beautiful name are currently only living in Tennessee or Texas. However, we must admit that 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 quite possible that there are still a few men and boys called Bray living in one state or another. (If your name is Bray and you live outside of Tennessee and Texas, we’d really appreciate it if you’d let us know so we can refine our statistics even further.) Which means – if you put this number in relation to the population of the USA – only one in 571,451 boys and men would turn around if you called out the name Bray. So if your name is Bray, it’s very likely that you won’t need a nickname in your peer group, because having the name Bray already makes you quite special.
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 Bray 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 Bray 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 Bray, you can simply say:
Butterfly
Rocket
Apple
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Bray
Bray
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
B
R
A
Y
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
R
A
Y
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. Bray sounds like this:
