Erica is the feminine form of Eric, a name with Old Norse origins. It comes from Eiríkr, which means ‘ever ruler’. The name Erica coincides with the Latin word ‘erica’ for ‘heather’, but this word is not related to the name.
Erica is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Erica 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, Erica ranks 724. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Erica. In the entire USA, approximately 227,886 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Erica. That is 0.07 % of all living Americans.
Erica is the feminine form of Eric, a name with Old Norse origins. It comes from Eiríkr, which means ‘ever ruler’. The name Erica coincides with the Latin word ‘erica’ for ‘heather’, but this word is not related to the name.
Erica first appeared... as a given name in the 18th century, older variants such as Eryca are known since the 17th century.
This was a real surprise! Erica is a name that has been around for a long time, but only really took off at the end of the 20th century. According to our SmartGenius statistics, it reached its highest rank at #31 in the year 1986, when 10,033 parents chose this name for their newborn daughter. This made Erica much more popular than in previous generations, where it was so rare for several years that it was not even recorded in the statistics. Now, this name seems to have found its place and has established itself in the beginning of the 21st century as well.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Erica was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Erica ranked 1,215 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to baby girls a total of 175 times. No one knows what names (or combinations of numbers and letters) will be popular 50 years from now, but given its consistent popularity, there is a good chance that Erica will remain a universally popular name.
Everyone knows her, everyone loves her and still she’s different from the mainstream: Erica occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the more than 50,000 different female first names that occur in the USA, just 537 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Erica is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Erica is not one of those names that one encounters in every neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, is noticeable and special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 227,658 women and girls of all generations bear the name Erica – that is one in 677. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Delaware, where one in 449 women and girls is called Erica, while it is particularly rare in Iowa, where you have to ask an average of 1,060 women for their name to get Erica as an answer 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 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 five letters, the name Erica 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 3.9%, 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 Erica 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 Erica, you can simply say:
Elephant
Rocket
Igloo
Cat
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Erica
Erica
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
R
I
C
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
I
C
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. Erica sounds like this:
