Dessa is a first name for girls.
There’s a good chance that a girl named Dessa in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Dessa in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 girls is named Dessa by her parents. In the ranking of most common girls names in recent years, Dessa ranks at #6,266. That means there are 6,265 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 Dessa.
Dessa is not an overly common name, in fact in some of the last 143 years it has been given so infrequently that it doesn't even show up in our statistics (here a name is only recorded in those years in which it was given to newborns at least five times). This was, for example, most recently the case in 1997, where the name Dessa was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Dessa and were born in the USA in 1997, please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the 19th century, Dessa even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1880, it ranked on position 477 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Dessa was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Dessa has a changeful history, it has clearly arrived in the present. In 2022, the name was given by young parents to their newborn children a remarkable 10 times and thus landed on position 8,408 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 10 girls with the name Dessa, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is highly likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children with this name.
The first name Dessa is a true rarity among all women and girls currently living in the United States – only 20 Americans in total bear this name. And these 20 women are located in only three states: Alabama, California and Texas (it should be noted that the official statistics provide the data per state only if there are at least 5 women with this name in the state. So, if your name is Dessa and you live outside the states marked on the map, please let us know so we can improve our statistics). The state with the most girls and women named Dessa in relation to it’s female population is Alabama. And yet even there, only one in 349,206 women would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Dessa.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter D is quite common as an initial letter for girls' names. To be precise, 5.6% of all 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 five letters, the name Dessa 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 5.6% of all girls' names start with D, this initial letter occurs much more often than all 26 letters on average. And maybe interesting to know: of all the names that begin with a D, Dorothy is the most common.
If your name is Dessa 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 Dessa, you can simply say:
Dinosaur
Elephant
Sun
Sun
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Dessa
Dessa
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
D
E
S
S
A
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
S
S
A
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. Dessa sounds like this:
