Dorcas is a first name for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Dorcas is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 girls have been named Dorcas. In the SmartGenius ranking, Dorcas is #4,432 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 Dorcas.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Dorcas annualy. This means that there have been girls named Dorcas 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 Dorcas 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 Dorcas even more than any other time: in 1880, it holds its present record of rank #500 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Dorcas was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Dorcas has never been ranked higher than #500. In 2022, she rivaled the 4,419 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 26 girls named Dorcas were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Dorcas were born, there have been 25 newborns who received this name.
You may not know anyone named Dorcas, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 25 states are home to women and girls named Dorcas. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Dorcas living in one state or another. If your name is Dorcas and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In West Virginia, which has the most people named Dorcas relative to the population, you still have to ask 10,462 women and girls their names before you hear Dorcas as an answer just once.
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 six letters, the name Dorcas is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. 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 Dorcas 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 Dorcas, you can simply say:
Dinosaur
Orange
Rocket
Cat
Apple
Sun
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Dorcas
Dorcas
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
D
O
R
C
A
S
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
R
C
A
S
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. Dorcas sounds like this:
