Hope comes from the English word ‘hope’, ultimately from Old English ‘hopian’. This name was first used by the Puritans in the 17th century.
Hope is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Hope 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, Hope ranks 215. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 9 were named Hope. In the entire USA, approximately 89,150 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Hope. That is 0.03 % of all living Americans.
Hope comes from the English word ‘hope’, ultimately from Old English ‘hopian’. This name was first used by the Puritans in the 17th century.
Who are the Puritans? Puritans were a group of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to 'purify' the Church of England. They held strict religious beliefs and advocated for simplicity in worship.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Hope annualy. This means that there have been girls named Hope 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 Hope 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 Hope: in 1999, it holds its present record of #137 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Hope was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Hope has never been ranked higher than #137. In 2022, she rivaled the 244 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 1,194 girls named Hope were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Hope were born, there have been 892 newborns who received this name.
The name Hope may not be in the top rankings of the most popular girls’ names, but it is one of the few female given names, along with only 536 others, that can be found in every single state in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and from California to New York. Of course, the name occurs more frequently in some states than in others – and Hope is apparently especially popular in Rhode Island. Although the name is not one of the top 100 most popular women’s names here either, one in 739 women in Rhode Island is called Hope. In total, that’s 756 women who feel addressed when the name Hope is shouted loudly across Rhode Island and who ensure that their name makes it to #191 in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common female names in this nice state. If you asked all women in the entire U.S. for their first name, you would hear Hope as the answer a total of 89,137 times. This places Hope at #365 in our SmartGenius statistics for the most popular women’s names in the whole of the USA. This is true for all currently living women across all states and age groups – the recent popularity of the name Hope as a baby name is, of course, a bit 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 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 four letters, the name Hope 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.
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 Hope 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 Hope, you can simply say:
Hat
Orange
Pig
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Hope
Hope
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
H
O
P
E
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
O
P
E
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. Hope sounds like this:
