Jennifer is a variant of Guinevere, which means ‘the fair one’ or ‘the white one’. In Arthurian legend, Guinevere was the beautiful wife of King Arthur.
Jennifer is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Jennifer isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all girls names, Jennifer ranks 266. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 7 were named Jennifer. In total, there are currently 1,465,129 people – children, adults and seniors – named Jennifer living in the United States, which is approximately 0.44 % of the entire population.
This was a real surprise! Jennifer is a name that has been around for a long time, but only really took off at the end of the 20th century. According to our SmartGenius statistics, it reached its highest rank at #1 in the year 1984, when 50,765 parents chose this name for their newborn daughter. This made Jennifer much more popular than in previous generations, where it was so rare for several years that it was not even recorded in the statistics. Now, this name seems to have found its place and has established itself in the beginning of the 21st century as well.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Jennifer was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Jennifer ranked 463 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to baby girls a total of 624 times. No one knows what names (or combinations of numbers and letters) will be popular 50 years from now, but given its consistent popularity, there is a good chance that Jennifer will remain a universally popular name.
Regardless of where you live in the US, chances are you know someone called Jennifer. Because: There are women and girls named Jennifer in every state in the USA. If this does not sound particularly spectacular to you, you should know that of the more than 50,000 different female first names that occur in the USA, just 537 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Jennifer is definitely something very special. In some regions it’s even the most frequently found female first name, for example in California, where Jennifer is number one in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common first names for women. The greatest chance of meeting Jennifer, however, is in Alaska. (Interesting to know: The state in which a name achieves the highest ranking compared to all other names does not have to be the state in which it also occurs most frequently in relation to the population.) In Alaska, one in 64 girls and women bears this popular name – that is far above average – in the entire USA it is only one in 105 women and girls and in Mississippi, where the name is least represented in relation to the population, you even have to ask an average of 154 women and girls for their name before you once get Jennifer as an answer.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter J is a particularly popular initial letter for girls' names. That’s because 6.8% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for girls’ names are A, S and M.
With eight letters, the name Jennifer is long compared to other names. In fact, 14.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly eight letters. 78% of all first names are shorter, while only 8% of all boys’ and girls’ names use nine letters or even more. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long with no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
This means that with 6.8% of all girls' names that begin with the letter J, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average. And Jennifer is the girls' name starting with J, which is the most common of all.
If your name is Jennifer 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 Jennifer, you can simply say:
Joker
Elephant
Nut
Nut
Igloo
Fox
Elephant
Rocket
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Jennifer
Jennifer
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
J
E
N
N
I
F
E
R
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
N
N
I
F
E
R
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. Jennifer sounds like this:
