Fern is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
Fern is a well-known name in the US, but is still special. It is currently only given to every ten thousandth girl, and therefore ranks at 1,817 in the SmartGenius statistics. This means there are 1,816 girls names that are more common, but also tens of thousands that are much rarer. In the entire USA, approximately 28,038 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Fern. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Fern annualy. This means that there have been girls named Fern 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 women named Fern have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Fern even more than any other time: in 1916, it holds its present record of #148 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Fern was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Fern has never been ranked higher than #148. In 2022, she rivaled the 1,312 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 148 girls named Fern were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Fern were born, there have been 5 newborns who received this name.
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 girls' names: only 1.2% of all common girls' names in the US begin with an F. 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 four letters, the name Fern is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four 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 if 1.2% of all girls' names begin with an F, this initial letter is significantly less common than the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are girls' names with F that are quite popular, the most common at present is Frances.
If your name is Fern 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 Fern, you can simply say:
Fox
Elephant
Rocket
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Fern
Fern
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
F
E
R
N
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
N
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. Fern sounds like this:
