Jenny is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Jenny 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, Jenny ranks 989. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Jenny. In the entire USA, approximately 86,662 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Jenny. That is 0.03 % of all living Americans.
Originally, Jenny was used in the Middle Ages as a diminutive of Jane meaning ‘Yahweh is gracious’. It was derived from the Hebrew name Yochanan. Since the middle of the 20th century, it is usually the diminutive of Jennifer which means ‘the fair one’.
As early as the 19th century... Jenny was used as a given name on its own but it was very rare in the US until the 1950s. Before, the spelling Jennie was more common.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Jenny annualy. This means that there have been girls named Jenny who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus women named Jenny have consistently been special. The name became especially popular in the last quarter of the last century and there was one year in particular when parents of Generation X and Generation Y rather came up with the idea of naming their child Jenny: in 1977, it holds its present record of #104 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Jenny was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Jenny has never been ranked higher than #104. In 2022, she rivaled the 1,260 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 164 girls named Jenny were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Jenny were born, there have been 1,140 newborns who received this name.
The name Jenny may not be in the top rankings of the most popular girls’ names, but it is one of the few female given names, along with only 536 others, that can be found in every single state in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and from California to New York. Of course, the name occurs more frequently in some states than in others – and Jenny is apparently especially popular in Utah. Although the name is not one of the top 100 most popular women’s names here either, one in 822 women in Utah is called Jenny. In total, that’s 1,421 women who feel addressed when the name Jenny is shouted loudly across Utah and who ensure that their name makes it to #217 in our SmartGenius ranking of the most common female names in this nice state. If you asked all women in the entire U.S. for their first name, you would hear Jenny as the answer a total of 86,640 times. This places Jenny at #371 in our SmartGenius statistics for the most popular women’s names in the whole of the USA. This is true for all currently living women across all states and age groups – the recent popularity of the name Jenny as a baby name is, of course, a bit different, as you can see from the statistics above.
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 five letters, the name Jenny 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.
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 Jenny 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 Jenny, you can simply say:
Joker
Elephant
Nut
Nut
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Jenny
Jenny
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
J
E
N
N
Y
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
Y
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. Jenny sounds like this:
