Catharine is a first name for girls.
There’s a good chance that a girl named Catharine in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Catharine in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 girls is named Catharine by her parents. In the ranking of most common girls names in recent years, Catharine ranks at #7,869. That means there are 7,868 more common girls names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Catharine.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Catharine annualy. This means that there have been girls named Catharine who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus women named Catharine have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Catharine even more than any other time: in 1883, it holds its present record of rank #243 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Catharine was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Catharine has never been ranked higher than #243. In 2022, she rivaled the 11,783 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 6 girls named Catharine were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Catharine were born, there have been 65 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter C is a frequent initial letter for girls' names. This is because 6.0% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of girls' names, by the way, are A, S and M.
With nine letters, the name Catharine is relatively long compared to other names. In fact, 5.6% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly nine letters. 92% of all first names are shorter, while not even 2.5% of all boys’ and girls’ names use ten or more letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long with no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
That means that with 6.0% of all girls' names that begin with a C, this first letter is much more common than the average of all letters. And which girls’ name beginning with C do you think is the most common in the US? The answer is... Carol.
If your name is Catharine 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 Catharine, you can simply say:
Cat
Apple
Tiger
Hat
Apple
Rocket
Igloo
Nut
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Catharine
Catharine
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
C
A
T
H
A
R
I
N
E
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.
C
A
T
H
A
R
I
N
E
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. Catharine sounds like this:
