Elif is a female first name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Elif 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 Elif. In the SmartGenius ranking, Elif is #2,278 on the list of most common girls names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Elif.
In fact, the name Elif did not fit the trend of the last century. Young parents in the 2000s began to change that a bit. After several years of not being given at all (or less than 5 times, because that's the number required for a name to appear in the statistics), Elif seemed to be more popular than ever in 2022. Although the name never ranked higher than #1,702, 106 parents chose it that year, making it a potential new rising star on the horizon of beautiful and rare names. If your name is Elif, you are well on your way to becoming en vogue.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Elif was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
The odds of living in the same statae as someone named Elif are about the same as meeting someone with blue eyes in the entire country – both odds are about 25 to 30 %. More precisely, the first name Elif is registered in 11 states, among which are California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland or New Jersey. In proportion to the female population, most women and girls with the first name Elif live in New Jersey, and even there the name is rather special – only one in 47,288 would turn around if you called the name Elif across New Jersey.
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 Elif 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 Elif 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 Elif, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Igloo
Fox
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Elif
Elif
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
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.
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. Elif sounds like this: