Jeff is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Jeff 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 Jeff. In the SmartGenius ranking, Jeff is #1,926 on the list of most common boys names. In the entire USA, approximately 114,340 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Jeff. That is 0.03 % of all living Americans.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Jeff is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Jeff for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Jeff is therefore one of only 442 boys’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Jeff is a very special name that peaked in popularity some time ago in the 20th century. Placed at #44 Jeff easily made it into the top 100 boys' names of our SmartGenius statistics for male first names and has never been more popular than back in 1962.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Jeff was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 45 babies were named Jeff in the USA in 2022, ranking it at #2,496 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2020, when it was only ranked #2,498 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 43 boys were named Jeff.
Everyone knows him, everyone loves him and still he’s different from the mainstream: Jeff occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the nearly 50,000 different male first names that occur in the USA, only 386 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Jeff is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Jeff is not one of those names that everyone encounters in his neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, captures attention and is something special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 114,340 men and boys of all generations bear the name Jeff – that is one in 1,460. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Iowa, where one in 400 men and boys is called Jeff, while it is particularly rare in Rhode Island, where you have to ask an average of 6,172 men for their name to get Jeff as an answer once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter J is the most popular first letter for boys’ names. 10.1% of all common boys’ names in the US start with this letter. The second most common first letter in boys’ names is A.
With four letters, the name Jeff 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 10.1% of all boys’ names start with a J, this initial letter occurs nearly three times as often as all other letters on average. And, by the way, of all the boys’ names that begin with the letter J, the name James is the most common.
If your name is Jeff 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 Jeff, you can simply say:
Joker
Elephant
Fox
Fox
The NATO alphabet often helps people spell words on the phone or radio when there are communication problems.
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Jeff
Jeff
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
J
E
F
F
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.
J
E
F
F
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. Jeff sounds like this:
