Earnest is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Earnest is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 boys have been named Earnest. In the SmartGenius ranking, Earnest is #3,069 on the list of most common boys names. In the entire USA, approximately 50,473 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Earnest. That is 0.02 % of all living Americans.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Earnest annualy. This means that there have been boys named Earnest 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 men named Earnest 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 Earnest even more than any other time: in 1900, it holds its present record at rank #102 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Earnest was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Earnest has never been ranked higher than #102. In 2022, he rivaled the 3,735 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 24 boys named Earnest were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Earnest were born, there have been 135 newborns who received this name.
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 seven letters, the name Earnest 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.
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 Earnest 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 Earnest, you can simply say:
Elephant
Apple
Rocket
Nut
Elephant
Sun
Tiger
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Earnest
Earnest
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
A
R
N
E
S
T
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
N
E
S
T
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. Earnest sounds like this:
