Ike is a first name for boys.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Ike is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 boys have been named Ike. In the SmartGenius ranking, Ike is #1,921 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 Ike.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Ike annualy. This means that there have been boys named Ike 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 Ike have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Ike even more than any other time: in 1884, it holds its present record at rank #177 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ike was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Ike has never been ranked higher than #177. In 2022, he rivaled the 2,226 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 54 boys named Ike were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Ike were born, there have been 26 newborns who received this name.
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 only three letters, the name Ike is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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 Ike 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 Ike, you can simply say:
Igloo
Koala
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ike
Ike
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
I
K
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.
I
K
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. Ike sounds like this:
