The name Forrest comes from an English surname meaning ‘forest’, originally belonging to a person who lived near a woodland. The word goes back to Latin ‘foris’ for ‘outside’.
Forrest is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Forrest 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 boys names, Forrest ranks 541. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 3 were named Forrest. In the entire USA, approximately 44,251 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Forrest. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
The name Forrest comes from an English surname meaning ‘forest’, originally belonging to a person who lived near a woodland. The word goes back to Latin ‘foris’ for ‘outside’.
Forrest has long... been known in the US, but has become increasingly rare since the 1920s. After the release of the movie 'Forrest Gump' in 1994, the name was more popular for a short time.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Forrest annualy. This means that there have been boys named Forrest 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 Forrest 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 Forrest even more than any other time: in 1907, it holds its present record at rank #158 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Forrest was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Forrest has never been ranked higher than #158. In 2022, he rivaled the 377 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 806 boys named Forrest were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Forrest were born, there have been 832 newborns who received this name.
Everyone knows him, everyone loves him and still he’s different from the mainstream: Forrest occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the nearly 50,000 different male first names that occur in the USA, only 386 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Forrest 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, Forrest is not one of those names that everyone encounters in his neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, captures attention and is something special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 44,220 men and boys of all generations bear the name Forrest – that is one in 3,775. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Oregon, where one in 400 men and boys is called Forrest, while it is particularly rare in Rhode Island, where you have to ask an average of 104,923 men for their name to get Forrest as an answer 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 seven letters, the name Forrest has a typical length for first names in the US. In fact, 26% of all common first names consist of exactly seven letters. 52% of all first names are shorter, while 22% have eight letters or more. 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.
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 Forrest 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 Forrest, you can simply say:
Fox
Orange
Rocket
Rocket
Elephant
Sun
Tiger
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Forrest
Forrest
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
F
O
R
R
E
S
T
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
O
R
R
E
S
T
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. Forrest sounds like this:
