Irena is a female first name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Irena is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 girls have been named Irena. In the SmartGenius ranking, Irena is #4,330 on the list of most common girls names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Irena.
Irena is not an overly common name, in fact in some of the last 143 years it has been given so infrequently that it doesn't even show up in our statistics (here a name is only recorded in those years in which it was given to newborns at least five times). This was, for example, most recently the case in 1895, where the name Irena was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Irena and were born in the USA in 1895, please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the 19th century, Irena even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1882, it ranked on position 534 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Irena was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Irena has a changeful history, it has clearly arrived in the present. In 2022, the name was given by young parents to their newborn children a remarkable 23 times and thus landed on position 4,797 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 23 girls with the name Irena, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is highly likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children with this name.
The first name Irena is a true rarity among all women and girls currently living in the United States – only 155 Americans in total bear this name. And these 155 women are located in only four states: California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York (it should be noted that the official statistics provide the data per state only if there are at least 5 women with this name in the state. So, if your name is Irena 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 girls and women named Irena in relation to it’s female population is California. And yet even there, only one in 181,865 women would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Irena.
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 five letters, the name Irena is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five 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 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 Irena 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 Irena, you can simply say:
Igloo
Rocket
Elephant
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Irena
Irena
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
I
R
E
N
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
R
E
N
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. Irena sounds like this:
