Era 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 Era 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 Era. In the SmartGenius ranking, Era is #3,760 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 Era.
Era 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 2001, where the name Era was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Era and were born in the USA in 2001, 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, Era even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1898, it ranked on position 332 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Era was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Era 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 50 times and thus landed on position 2,862 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 50 girls with the name Era, 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.
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 only three letters, the name Era is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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 Era 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 Era, you can simply say:
Elephant
Rocket
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Era
Era
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
R
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
R
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. Era sounds like this:
