Elan is a male first name. In some cases it's also given to girls.
Elan is a well-known name in the US, but is still special. It is currently only given to every ten thousandth boy, and therefore ranks at 1380 in the SmartGenius statistics. This means there are 1,379 boys names that are more common, but also tens of thousands that are much rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Elan.
Elan 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 Elan - until this very name unexpectedly cried out for attention and peaked in popularity at rank number 892 in 1984. Although it has never reached the top 100 list, this boys' name seems to have been in vogue for a while, which makes Elan really in tune with his generation.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Elan was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
90 babies were named Elan in 2022 - that's 1 in 2,017,825 newborn boys. With this number, the boys' name Elan ranked 1,622 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
The odds of having a man or boy named Elan 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 Elan is registered in 19 states, among which are California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia or Illinois. In proportion to the male population, most men and boys with the first name Elan live in New York, but even there the name is rather special – on average, you would have to ask 23,085 men and boys in New York for their name before you meet one who answers with Elan.
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 four letters, the name Elan is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four 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 Elan 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 Elan, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Apple
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Elan
Elan
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
L
A
N
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
L
A
N
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. Elan sounds like this:
