The name Erika is the feminine form of Erik, a name with Old Norse origins. It comes from Eiríkr, which means ‘ever ruler’.
Erika is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Erika 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, Erika ranks 718. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Erika. In the entire USA, approximately 122,154 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Erika. That is 0.04 % of all living Americans.
This was a real surprise! Erika 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 #70 in the year 1990, when 4,591 parents chose this name for their newborn daughter. This made Erika 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 Erika was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Erika ranked 1,147 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to baby girls a total of 189 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 Erika will remain a universally popular name.
The name Erika may not be in the top rankings of the most popular girls’ names, but it is one of the few female given names, along with only 536 others, that can be found in every single state in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and from California to New York. Of course, the name occurs more frequently in some states than in others – and Erika is apparently especially popular in California. Although the name is not one of the top 100 most popular women’s names here either, one in 597 women in California is called Erika. In total, that’s 24,989 women who feel addressed when the name Erika is shouted loudly across California and who ensure that their name makes it to #128 in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common female names in this nice state. If you asked all women in the entire U.S. for their first name, you would hear Erika as the answer a total of 121,976 times. This places Erika at #283 in our SmartGenius statistics for the most popular women’s names in the whole of the USA. This is true for all currently living women across all states and age groups – the recent popularity of the name Erika as a baby name is, of course, a bit different, as you can see from the statistics above.
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 Erika 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 Erika 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 Erika, you can simply say:
Elephant
Rocket
Igloo
Koala
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Erika
Erika
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
E
R
I
K
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
K
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. Erika sounds like this:
