Douglas was originally a Scottish surname meaning ‘dark river’. It is composed of Gaelic ‘dubh’ for ‘dark’ and ‘glais’ for ‘water, river’. The surname was taken from a town’s name, which was named after the neaby river.
Douglas is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Douglas isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all boys names, Douglas ranks 608. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Douglas. In total, there are currently 552,519 people – children, adults and seniors – named Douglas living in the United States, which is approximately 0.16 % of the entire population.
Douglas was originally a Scottish surname meaning ‘dark river’. It is composed of Gaelic ‘dubh’ for ‘dark’ and ‘glais’ for ‘water, river’. The surname was taken from a town’s name, which was named after the neaby river.
As a given name,... Douglas was quite popular from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Douglas is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Douglas for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Douglas is therefore one of only 442 boys’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Douglas is a very special name that peaked in popularity some time ago in the 20th century. Placed at #23 Douglas 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 1942.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Douglas was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Douglas is one of them. However, Douglas is not equally widespread in all states, but people in South Dakota seem to particularly fancy this name – the 4,112 men called Douglas who live here are 0,723% of all male residents and push their name up to #24 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in South Dakota. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 552,519 people with the name Douglas. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Douglas on position 59 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 seven letters, the name Douglas has a typical length for first names in the US. In fact, 26% of all common first names consist of exactly seven letters. 52% of all first names are shorter, while 22% have eight 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 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 Douglas 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 Douglas, you can simply say:
Dinosaur
Orange
Unicorn
Goat
Lion
Apple
Sun
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Douglas
Douglas
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
D
O
U
G
L
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
U
G
L
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. Douglas sounds like this:
