Elie is a masculine first name but has increasingly been given to girls in recent years.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Elie 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 Elie. In the SmartGenius ranking, Elie is #2,739 on the list of most common boys names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Elie.
Elie 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 1904, where the name Elie was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Elie and were born in the USA in 1904, 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, Elie even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1886, it ranked on position 455 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Elie was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Elie 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 40 times and thus landed on position 2,160 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 40 boys with the name Elie, 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 Elie 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 Elie is registered in 11 states, among which are Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia or Louisiana. In proportion to the male population, most men and boys with the first name Elie live in Louisiana, but even there the name is rather special – on average, you would have to ask 24,107 men and boys in Louisiana for their name before you meet one who answers with Elie.
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 Elie 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 Elie 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 Elie, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Igloo
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Elie
Elie
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
L
I
E
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
I
E
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. Elie sounds like this:
