Ebony is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Ebony is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 girls have been named Ebony. In the SmartGenius ranking, Ebony is #2,672 on the list of most common girls names. In the entire USA, approximately 36,180 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Ebony. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Ebony is a phenomenon of Generation X and Y. Previously, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Schoolkids of the early 20th century probably didn't have classmates named Ebony - until this very name unexpectedly cried out for attention and peaked in popularity at rank number 129 in 1982. Although it has never reached the top 100 list, this girls' name seems to have been in vogue for a while, which makes Ebony really in tune with her generation.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ebony was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
28 babies were named Ebony in 2022 - that's 1 in 5,293,996 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Ebony ranked 4,219 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
You may not know anyone named Ebony, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 39 states are home to women and girls named Ebony. (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 Ebony living in one state or another. If your name is Ebony 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 Louisiana, which has the most people named Ebony relative to the population, you still have to ask 1,970 women and girls their names before you hear Ebony as an answer just once.
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 girls' names: 3.9% of all common 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, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of girls' names.
With five letters, the name Ebony 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 3.9%, E as the first letter in girls' names is almost as common as all 26 letters on average - and of all the girls' names that start with an E, Elizabeth is the most common.
If your name is Ebony 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 Ebony, you can simply say:
Elephant
Butterfly
Orange
Nut
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ebony
Ebony
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
B
O
N
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
B
O
N
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. Ebony sounds like this:
