The name Harry is a medieval form of the English name Henry, which developed from the Germanic Heimrich. It means ‘home ruler’ and was introduced to England by the Normans.
Harry is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Harry 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, Harry ranks 652. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Harry. In total, there are currently 356,026 people – children, adults and seniors – named Harry living in the United States, which is approximately 0.11 % of the entire population.
The name Harry is a medieval form of the English name Henry, which developed from the Germanic Heimrich. It means ‘home ruler’ and was introduced to England by the Normans.
Harry is a very special boy's name - although it peaked in popularity more than 100 years ago, it is one of the exclusive circle of only 442 boys' names that haven been given in each of the 143 years for which official U.S. name statistics are available. The most popular was Harry in 1889 - at #8 it even made it into the top 10 of the most popular boys’ names in our SmartGenius first name statistics.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Harry was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
379 young parents chose the name Harry for their newborn child in 2022, placing it at number 653 in our ranking of the most popular boys' names - in other words, 652 names were given more frequently to boys on 2022. However, the rarest use of the name Harry was in 2015 when only 301 babies were given the name, placing it at #735 in our SmartGenius first name rankings.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Harry is one of them. However, Harry is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Pennsylvania seem to particularly fancy this name – the 50,878 men called Harry who live here are 0,575% of all male residents and push their name up to #33 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Pennsylvania. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 356,026 people with the name Harry. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Harry on position 89 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter H is not particularly common as a first letter for boys' names: only 2.9% of all common boys' names in the US begin with an H. The most common first letters for boys' names are J and A, while X and U are the least common first letters of boys' names.
With five letters, the name Harry 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.
This means that if 2.9% of all boys' names begin with an H, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are of course some names that begin with H and are extremely popular, for example Henry, currently the most common boys’ name with H.
If your name is Harry 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 Harry, you can simply say:
Hat
Apple
Rocket
Rocket
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Harry
Harry
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
H
A
R
R
Y
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
R
R
Y
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. Harry sounds like this:
