Ethel is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
There’s a good chance that a girl named Ethel in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Ethel in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 girls is named Ethel by her parents. In the ranking of most common girls names in recent years, Ethel ranks at #4,938. That means there are 4,937 more common girls names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. In the entire USA, approximately 194,400 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Ethel. That is 0.06 % of all living Americans.
Ethel is a very special girls' name - although the peak of its popularity dates back more than 100 years, it belongs to the exclusive circle of only 432 girls names that haven been given in each of the 143 years for which official name statistics in the USA are available. The most popular was Ethel in 1896 - ranking #6 it even made it into the top 10 of the most popular girls names in our SmartGenius first name statistics.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ethel was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
28 young parents chose the name Ethel for their newborn child in 2022, placing it at number 4,219 in our ranking of the most popular girls names - in other words, 4,218 names were given more frequently to girls in 2022. However, the rarest use of the name was in 2008 with only 13 babies given that name, which puts it at rank 8,071 in our SmartGenius first name statistics.
There are only 537 different women’s names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Ethel is one of them. However, Ethel is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Mississippi seem to particularly fancy this name – the 8,061 women called Ethel who live here are 0,419% of all female residents and push their name up to #42, easily placing it in the top 100 most common female names in Mississippi.
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 Ethel 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 Ethel 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 Ethel, you can simply say:
Elephant
Tiger
Hat
Elephant
Lion
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ethel
Ethel
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
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.
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. Ethel sounds like this: