Iain is a male first name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Iain is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 3 out of 100,000 boys have been named Iain. In the SmartGenius ranking, Iain is #2,473 on the list of most common boys names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Iain.
In fact, the name Iain did not fit the trend of the last century. Young parents in the 2000s began to change that a bit. After several years of not being given at all (or less than 5 times, because that's the number required for a name to appear in the statistics), Iain seemed to be more popular than ever in 2003. Although the name never ranked higher than #1,112, 126 parents chose it that year, making it a potential new rising star on the horizon of beautiful and rare names. If your name is Iain, you are well on your way to becoming en vogue.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Iain was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, expectant parents chose the yet rare name Iain a few times. Among all newborn boys it ranked #3,562 - with a total of 26 baby boys. This means, as you can see above, that the name is still more common than it was most time of the last century, when it supposedly didn't appear at all for many years - giving boys with this first name a sheen of something particularly contemporary and special.
The odds that a man or boy named Iain lives in your home state are about the same as betting on heads or tails in a coin toss. This boy’s name is quite popular, but not equally so throughout the entire USA. You can meet boys and men with the name Iain in 21 states – which is obviously nearly every second of all 50 states in the USA, for example in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia or Illinois. In relation to the number of residents, the most men and boys with the first name Iain live in California – here, one in 50,562 bears this name. In comparison, if we look at all living men and boys in the whole country, only one in 191,866 will turn around if you call his first name Iain.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter I is quite rare as a first letter for boys' names: only 1.5% of all common boys' names in the US begin with an I. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D, while X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names.
With four letters, the name Iain 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 1.5% of all boys' names begin with an I, this initial letter is significantly less common than the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are boys' names with I that are quite popular, the most common at present is Isaac.
If your name is Iain 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 Iain, you can simply say:
Igloo
Apple
Igloo
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Iain
Iain
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
I
A
I
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.
I
A
I
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. Iain sounds like this:
