Ilya is a masculine first name but has increasingly been given to girls in recent years.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Ilya is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 boys have been named Ilya. In the SmartGenius ranking, Ilya is #2,849 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 Ilya.
In fact, the name Ilya 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), Ilya seemed to be more popular than ever in 2018. Although the name never ranked higher than #1,946, 65 parents chose it that year, making it a potential new rising star on the horizon of beautiful and rare names. If your name is Ilya, you are well on your way to becoming en vogue.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ilya was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, expectant parents chose the yet rare name Ilya a few times. Among all newborn boys it ranked #2,649 - with a total of 41 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 first name Ilya is a true rarity among all men and boys currently living in the United States – only 210 Americans in total bear this name. And these 210 men are located in only five states: California, Florida, New York, Texas and Washington (it should be noted that the official statistics provide the data per state only if there are at least 5 men with this name in the state. So, if your name is Ilya and you live outside the states marked on the map, please let us know so we can improve our statistics). The state with the most boys and men named Ilya in relation to it’s male population is Washington. And yet even there, only one in 76,392 men would raise his hand if asked whether there was a Ilya present.
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 Ilya 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 Ilya 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 Ilya, you can simply say:
Igloo
Lion
Yoyo
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ilya
Ilya
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
I
L
Y
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.
I
L
Y
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. Ilya sounds like this:
