Derek is an English name, that has its origin in the German name Theodoric. It is derived from the Gothic name ‘Þiudareiks’ meaning ‘ruler of the people’, composed of the elements ‘þiuda’ for ‘people’ and ‘reiks’ for ‘ruler, king’.
Derek is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Derek 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, Derek ranks 240. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 9 were named Derek. In the entire USA, approximately 232,786 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Derek. That is 0.07 % of all living Americans.
Derek is an English name, that has its origin in the German name Theodoric. It is derived from the Gothic name ‘Þiudareiks’ meaning ‘ruler of the people’, composed of the elements ‘þiuda’ for ‘people’ and ‘reiks’ for ‘ruler, king’.
Comedian Ricky Gervais stars... in a tv series entitled 'Derek', that he has also written and directed. The Netflix show ran from 2012 to 2014.
This was a real surprise! Derek is a name that has been around for a long time, but only really took off at the end of the 20th century. According to our SmartGenius statistics, it reached its highest rank at #50 in the year 1980, when 7,303 parents chose this name for their newborn son. This made Derek much more popular than in previous generations, where it was so rare for several years that it was not even recorded in the statistics. Now, this boys' name seems to have found its place and has established itself in the beginning of the 21st century as well.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Derek was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Derek ranked 289 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to newborn boys a total of 1,147 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 Derek will remain a universally popular name.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Derek is one of them. However, Derek is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Hawaii seem to particularly fancy this name – the 1,524 men called Derek who live here are 0,281% of all male residents and push their name up to #88 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Hawaii. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 232,786 people with the name Derek. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Derek on position 155 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 D is a quite popular first letter for boys’ names. That’s because 8.5% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters J and A are more common for boys' names.
With five letters, the name Derek 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.
Therefore: As 8.5% of all boys' names start with a D, this initial letter occurs nearly 2.5-times as often as all 26 letters on average – and the most common one of all the boys’ names starting with D is David.
If your name is Derek 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 Derek, you can simply say:
Dinosaur
Elephant
Rocket
Elephant
Koala
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Derek
Derek
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
D
E
R
E
K
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.
D
E
R
E
K
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. Derek sounds like this:
