Brent is an Old English name, originally a surname derived from various place names. Its meaning is not entirely clear, but connections to the Gaelic words ‘briga’ for ‘hill’ or ‘brigant’ for ‘high, elevated’ are considered likely.
Brent is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Brent 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, Brent ranks 910. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 1 were named Brent. In the entire USA, approximately 136,476 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Brent. That is 0.04 % of all living Americans.
Brent is an Old English name, originally a surname derived from various place names. Its meaning is not entirely clear, but connections to the Gaelic words ‘briga’ for ‘hill’ or ‘brigant’ for ‘high, elevated’ are considered likely.
Brent was used... sporadically as early as the 19th century and was quite popular in the 1970s and 1980s.
Who would have thought it? After many years of not appearing at all in the SmartGenius statistics, Brent reached its highest rank ever in the year 1971 at #73. In other words: 4,074 newborn boys were named Brent that year. Since then, it has been considered to be a universally popular name, chosen by a large number of happy parents every year. Although the times of its highest popularity are now many decades ago, Brent is still going strong and has not been forgotten yet. We can only wait and see if there will be a new surprise in store and if Brent will be able to top its all-time best ranking ever again.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Brent was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Brent ranked 1,257 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to baby boys a total of 135 times. No one knows what names (or combinations of numbers and letters) will be popular 50 years from now, but given its consistent popularity, there is a good chance that Brent will remain a universally popular name.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Brent is one of them. However, Brent is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Utah seem to particularly fancy this name – the 5,053 men called Brent who live here are 0,371% 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 Utah. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 136,476 people with the name Brent. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Brent on position 231 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 five letters, the name Brent 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 Brent 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 Brent, you can simply say:
Butterfly
Rocket
Elephant
Nut
Tiger
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Brent
Brent
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
B
R
E
N
T
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
E
N
T
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. Brent sounds like this:
