Dolly is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Dolly is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 3 out of 100,000 girls have been named Dolly. In the SmartGenius ranking, Dolly is #2,849 on the list of most common girls names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Dolly.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Dolly annualy. This means that there have been girls named Dolly 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 Dolly 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 Dolly even more than any other time: in 1881, it holds its present record of rank #271 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Dolly was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Dolly has never been ranked higher than #271. In 2022, she rivaled the 1,634 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 112 girls named Dolly were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Dolly were born, there have been 33 newborns who received this name.
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 Dolly 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 Dolly 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 Dolly, you can simply say:
Dinosaur
Orange
Lion
Lion
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Dolly
Dolly
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
D
O
L
L
Y
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
O
L
L
Y
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. Dolly sounds like this:
