Originally, Cohen was a Jewish surname that was derived from Hebrew ‘kohen’ meaning ‘priest’.
Cohen is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Cohen 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, Cohen ranks 308. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 6 were named Cohen. In the entire USA, approximately 17,471 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Cohen. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Originally, Cohen was a Jewish surname that was derived from Hebrew ‘kohen’ meaning ‘priest’.
Did you know... that Cohen is the most common surname in Israel?
Cohen is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Cohen cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #261 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2022. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Cohen, for there were many years in which not a single parent chose this first name for their son. Although it also has never been in the top 100 of most popular first names, Cohen seems to have been in vogue for a while, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Cohen was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
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 boys’ names. This is because 5.2% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D.
With five letters, the name Cohen 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.
With 5.2% of all boys' names that begin with a C, this first letter is thus much more common than the average of all letters. And which boys’ name beginning with C do you think is the most common in the US? The answer is... Charles.
If your name is Cohen 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 Cohen, you can simply say:
Cat
Orange
Hat
Elephant
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Cohen
Cohen
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
C
O
H
E
N
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
O
H
E
N
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. Cohen sounds like this:
