Originally, Ellis was an English and Welsh surname, derived from the given name Elis, a variant of Elias. This name is of Hebrew origin and means ‘my God is Yahweh’.
Ellis is a masculine first name but has increasingly been given to girls in recent years.
The name Ellis isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all boys names, Ellis ranks 372. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 5 were named Ellis. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Ellis.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Ellis annualy. This means that there have been boys named Ellis who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus men named Ellis have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Ellis even more than any other time: in 1896, it holds its present record at rank #138 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ellis was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Ellis has never been ranked higher than #138. In 2021, he rivaled the 228 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 1,527 boys named Ellis were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1991, when possibly the parents of the now very young Ellis were born, there have been 189 newborns who received this name.
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 five letters, the name Ellis 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 3.8%, 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 Ellis 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 Ellis, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Lion
Igloo
Sun
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ellis
Ellis
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
L
L
I
S
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
L
I
S
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. Ellis sounds like this:
