Ferdinand is a male first name.
There’s a good chance that a boy named Ferdinand in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Ferdinand in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 boys is named Ferdinand by his parents. In the ranking of most common boys names in recent years, Ferdinand ranks at #3,912. That means there are 3,911 more common boys names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Ferdinand.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Ferdinand annualy. This means that there have been boys named Ferdinand who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus men named Ferdinand have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Ferdinand even more than any other time: in 1884, it holds its present record at rank #217 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ferdinand was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Ferdinand has never been ranked higher than #217. In 2022, he rivaled the 3,294 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 29 boys named Ferdinand were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Ferdinand were born, there have been 28 newborns who received this name.
You may not know anyone named Ferdinand, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 26 states are home to men and boys named Ferdinand. (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 Ferdinand living in one state or another. If your name is Ferdinand 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 Louisiana, which has the most people named Ferdinand relative to the population, you still have to ask 6,153 men and boys their names before you hear Ferdinand as an answer just once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter F is quite rare as a first letter for boys' names: only 1.5% of all common boys' names in the US begin with an F. By the way, the most common first letters of boys' names are J, A and D, while X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names.
With nine letters, the name Ferdinand is relatively long compared to other names. In fact, 5.6% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly nine letters. 92% of all first names are shorter, while not even 2.5% of all boys’ and girls’ names use ten or more letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long with no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
Therefore: As 1.5% of all boys' names begin with an F, this initial letter is significantly less common than the other letters on average. However, individual boys' names with F are really popular, the most common currently being Frank.
If your name is Ferdinand 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 Ferdinand, you can simply say:
Fox
Elephant
Rocket
Dinosaur
Igloo
Nut
Apple
Nut
Dinosaur
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ferdinand
Ferdinand
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
F
E
R
D
I
N
A
N
D
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.
F
E
R
D
I
N
A
N
D
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. Ferdinand sounds like this:
