Early is a first name for boys, occasionally also given to girls.
Recently, the name Early has been given only a handful of times a year and is therefore particularly rare, at least in the US. In recent years, not even one boy in 100,000 has been named Early. That means that a boy named Early is exceptional and may not meet another person with the same name his whole life. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Early.
Early is not an overly common name, in fact in some of the last 143 years it has been given so infrequently that it doesn't even show up in our statistics (here a name is only recorded in those years in which it was given to newborns at least five times). This was, for example, most recently the case in 2020, where the name Early was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Early and were born in the USA in 2020, please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the 19th century, Early even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1897, it ranked on position 303 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Early was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Early has a changeful history, it has clearly arrived in the present. In 2022, the name was given by young parents to their newborn children a remarkable 10 times and thus landed on position 6,627 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 10 boys with the name Early, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is highly likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children with this name.
The odds of having a man or boy named Early in your home state are about the same as the chance for a white Christmas in New York City – in both cases they are less than 30%. More precisely, the first name Early is registered in 11 states, among which are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia or Louisiana. In proportion to the male population, most men and boys with the first name Early live in Alabama, but even there the name is rather special – on average, you would have to ask 7,210 men and boys in Alabama for their name before you meet one who answers with Early.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter E is neither particularly common nor particularly rare as a first letter for boys' names: 3.8% of all common boys' names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D, while X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names.
With five letters, the name Early 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.
That means that with 3.8%, E as the first letter in boys' names is almost as common as all 26 letters on average - and of all the boys' names that start with an E, Edward is the most common.
If your name is Early 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 Early, you can simply say:
Elephant
Apple
Rocket
Lion
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Early
Early
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
A
R
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.
E
A
R
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. Early sounds like this:
