Ephraim is a first name for boys.
The name Ephraim 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, Ephraim ranks 875. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 1 were named Ephraim. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Ephraim.
Ephraim is not an overly common name, 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 1905, where the name Ephraim was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Ephraim and were born in the USA in 1905, please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the 19th century, Ephraim even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1880, it ranked on position 373 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ephraim was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Ephraim has a changeful history, it has clearly arrived in the present. In 2022, the name was given by young parents to their newborn children a remarkable 197 times and thus landed on position 1,017 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 197 boys with the name Ephraim, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is highly likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children with this name.
You may not know anyone named Ephraim, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 32 states are home to men and boys named Ephraim. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few men and boys named Ephraim living in one state or another. If your name is Ephraim and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Utah, which has the most people named Ephraim relative to the population, you still have to ask 6,515 men and boys their names before you hear Ephraim as an answer just once.
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 seven letters, the name Ephraim has a typical length for first names in the US. In fact, 26% of all common first names consist of exactly seven letters. 52% of all first names are shorter, while 22% have eight letters or more. 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 Ephraim 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 Ephraim, you can simply say:
Elephant
Pig
Hat
Rocket
Apple
Igloo
Mouse
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ephraim
Ephraim
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
P
H
R
A
I
M
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
P
H
R
A
I
M
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. Ephraim sounds like this:
