Elsa is a short form of Elisabeth, which goes back to the Hebrew Elischeva, meaning ‘my God is an oath’. Traditionally, Elsa was popular in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries.
Elsa is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Elsa 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 girls names, Elsa ranks 574. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 3 were named Elsa. In the entire USA, approximately 22,088 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Elsa. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Elsa is a short form of Elisabeth, which goes back to the Hebrew Elischeva, meaning ‘my God is an oath’. Traditionally, Elsa was popular in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries.
In the U.S.,... Elsa had its most popular phase around 1890, and for a short time around 2014 due to the Disney movie 'Frozen'.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Elsa annualy. This means that there have been girls named Elsa 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 Elsa 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 Elsa even more than any other time: in 1895, it holds its present record of rank #212 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Elsa was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Elsa has never been ranked higher than #212. In 2022, she rivaled the 898 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 262 girls named Elsa were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Elsa were born, there have been 229 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 Elsa 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 Elsa 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 Elsa, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Sun
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Elsa
Elsa
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. Elsa sounds like this: