Don is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
Don is a well-known name in the US, but is still special. It is currently only given to every ten thousandth boy, and therefore ranks at 1438 in the SmartGenius statistics. This means there are 1,437 boys names that are more common, but also tens of thousands that are much rarer. In the entire USA, approximately 161,353 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Don. That is 0.05 % of all living Americans.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Don is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Don for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Don is therefore one of only 442 boys’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Don is a very special name that peaked in popularity some time ago in the 20th century. Placed at #49 Don easily made it into the top 100 boys' names of our SmartGenius statistics for male first names and has never been more popular than back in 1934.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Don was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 114 babies were named Don in the USA in 2022, ranking it at #1,424 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2019, when it was only ranked #1,613 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 88 boys were named Don.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Don is one of them. However, Don is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Oklahoma seem to particularly fancy this name – the 6,198 men called Don who live here are 0,278% of all male residents and push their name up to #77 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Oklahoma. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 161,353 people with the name Don. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Don on position 201 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 only three letters, the name Don is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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 Don 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 Don, you can simply say:
Dinosaur
Orange
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Don
Don
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
D
O
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.
D
O
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. Don sounds like this:
