Indigo is a female first name, but it has increasingly been given to boys for a number of years.
Indigo is a well-known name in the US, but is still special. It is currently only given to every ten thousandth girl, and therefore ranks at 1,253 in the SmartGenius statistics. This means there are 1,252 girls names that are more common, but also tens of thousands that are much rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Indigo.
Indigo is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Indigo cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #685 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2021. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Indigo, for there were many years in which not a single parent chose this first name for their daughter. Although it also has never been in the top 100 of most popular first names, Indigo seems to have been in vogue for a while, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Indigo was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
385 babies were named Indigo in 2022 - that's 1 in 553,104 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Indigo ranked 686 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
You may not know anyone named Indigo, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 30 states are home to women and girls named Indigo. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Indigo living in one state or another. If your name is Indigo and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Utah, which has the most people named Indigo relative to the population, you still have to ask 28,487 women and girls their names before you hear Indigo as an answer just once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter I is pretty rare as an initial letter for girls' names: only 1.7% of all common girls' names in the US begin with an I. 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 six letters, the name Indigo is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. 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 since 1.7% of all girls’ names begin with an I, this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are of course single names that begin with an I, which are quite popular
If your name is Indigo 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 Indigo, you can simply say:
Igloo
Nut
Dinosaur
Igloo
Goat
Orange
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Indigo
Indigo
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
I
N
D
I
G
O
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
N
D
I
G
O
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. Indigo sounds like this:
