The name Hanna derived from the Hebrew name Channah meaning ‘favour’ or ‘grace’.
Hanna is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Hanna 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, Hanna ranks 458. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Hanna. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Hanna.
The name Hanna derived from the Hebrew name Channah meaning ‘favour’ or ‘grace’.
Although Hanna is a... very popular name, it has only been used more frequently since the mid-20th century.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Hanna annualy. This means that there have been girls named Hanna 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 Hanna have consistently been special. The name became especially popular in the last quarter of the last century and there was one year in particular when parents of Generation X and Generation Y rather came up with the idea of naming their child Hanna: in 1998, it holds its present record of #158 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Hanna was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Hanna has never been ranked higher than #158. In 2021, she rivaled the 505 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 547 girls named Hanna were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1991, when possibly the parents of the now very young Hanna were born, there have been 886 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter H is quite rare as a first letter for girls' names: only 1.7% of all common girls' names in the US begin with H. 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 Hanna 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.
Therefore: As 1.7% of all girls' names begin with an H, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Interesting detail: of all the names that begin with an H, Helen is the most common.
If your name is Hanna 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 Hanna, you can simply say:
Hat
Apple
Nut
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Hanna
Hanna
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
H
A
N
N
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.
H
A
N
N
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. Hanna sounds like this:
