Dorothea is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Dorothea 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 Dorothea. In the SmartGenius ranking, Dorothea is #3,088 on the list of most common girls names. In the entire USA, approximately 26,558 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Dorothea. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Dorothea annualy. This means that there have been girls named Dorothea 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 Dorothea have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Dorothea even more than any other time: in 1912, it holds its present record of #172 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Dorothea was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Dorothea has never been ranked higher than #172. In 2022, she rivaled the 2,457 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 62 girls named Dorothea were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Dorothea 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 eight letters, the name Dorothea is long compared to other names. In fact, 14.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly eight letters. 78% of all first names are shorter, while only 8% of all boys’ and girls’ names use nine letters or even more. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long with 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 Dorothea 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 Dorothea, you can simply say:
Dinosaur
Orange
Rocket
Orange
Tiger
Hat
Elephant
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Dorothea
Dorothea
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
D
O
R
O
T
H
E
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
O
R
O
T
H
E
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. Dorothea sounds like this:
