Elba is a female first name. In some cases it's also given to boys.
There’s a good chance that a girl named Elba in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Elba in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 girls is named Elba by her parents. In the ranking of most common girls names in recent years, Elba ranks at #9,534. That means there are 9,533 more common girls names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Elba.
Elba 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 1894, where the name Elba was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Elba and were born in the USA in 1894, 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, Elba even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1891, it ranked on position 704 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Elba was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Elba 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 14 times and thus landed on position 6,652 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 14 girls with the name Elba, 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.
It is not so easy to find a woman or girl named Elba in the USA. Although the name is not sooooo rare overall, it is only at home in a few selected regions of the USA. In the entire United States there are currently a total of 1,588 women and girls named Elba, but there are vast areas of the country where not a single person with this name can be found. In fact, the 1,588 women and girls named Elba live in no more than 9 different states, including for example California, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts and New Jersey. In all other 40 states, there are no – or, to be precise, less than a handful – women called Elba. (To explain: The official statistics provide the data per state only if at least five women with a specific name live in the same state. So, it’s quite possible that there are one or two states where someone with the name Elba lives although the name is not listed in the official statistics. Should you be one of those rare people whose name is Elba and you live outside the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can improve our statistics.). The state with the most girls and women named Elba relative to its female population is New York. And even there, only one in 12,943 women and girls would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Elba.
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 four letters, the name Elba 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 3.9%, 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 Elba 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 Elba, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Butterfly
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Elba
Elba
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
L
B
A
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
B
A
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. Elba sounds like this:
