Elma is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Elma is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 girls have been named Elma. In the SmartGenius ranking, Elma is #4,330 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 Elma.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Elma annualy. This means that there have been girls named Elma 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 women named Elma have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Elma even more than any other time: in 1901, it holds its present record of #205 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Elma was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Elma has never been ranked higher than #205. In 2022, she rivaled the 4,796 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 23 girls named Elma were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Elma were born, there have been 17 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 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 Elma 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 Elma 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 Elma, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Mouse
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Elma
Elma
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
L
M
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
M
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. Elma sounds like this:
