Elwin is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
There’s a good chance that a boy named Elwin in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Elwin in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 boys is named Elwin by his parents. In the ranking of most common boys names in recent years, Elwin ranks at #6,007. That means there are 6,006 more common boys names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Elwin.
Elwin is not one of the particularly popular names. 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 2015, where the name Elwin was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If your name is Elwin and you were born in the USA in 2015, please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the last century, Elwin even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1914, it ranked on position 430 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Elwin was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Even though the popularity of the name Elwin has fluctuated in the past and there were years when the name was almost not chosen at all by expectant parents, it has without question arrived in the 21st century. In 2022, the name was given a remarkable 18 times by young parents to their newborn children and thus landed on position 4,483 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular boys' names. Nevertheless, the name is still so rare that the 18 boys named Elwin, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is most likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children who turn around when someone calls 'Elwin'.
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 Elwin 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 Elwin 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 Elwin, you can simply say:
Elephant
Lion
Windmill
Igloo
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Elwin
Elwin
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
L
W
I
N
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
W
I
N
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. Elwin sounds like this:
