Katharine is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Katharine is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 girls have been named Katharine. In the SmartGenius ranking, Katharine is #2,272 on the list of most common girls names. In the entire USA, approximately 31,673 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Katharine. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Katharine annualy. This means that there have been girls named Katharine 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 Katharine have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Katharine even more than any other time: in 1880, it holds its present record of rank #167 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Katharine was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Katharine has never been ranked higher than #167. In 2022, she rivaled the 3,271 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 41 girls named Katharine were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Katharine were born, there have been 708 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter K is a real popular first letter for girls' names. That’s because 7.5% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters A, S and M are more common for girls' names.
With nine letters, the name Katharine is relatively long compared to other names. In fact, 5.6% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly nine letters. 92% of all first names are shorter, while not even 2.5% of all boys’ and girls’ names use ten or more letters. 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.
That means that if 7.5% of all girls' names start with a K, this initial letter occurs more than twice as often as all 26 letters on average. Interesting detail: of all the girls' names that begin with a K, Karen is the most common.
If your name is Katharine 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 Katharine, you can simply say:
Koala
Apple
Tiger
Hat
Apple
Rocket
Igloo
Nut
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Katharine
Katharine
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
A
T
H
A
R
I
N
E
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.
K
A
T
H
A
R
I
N
E
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. Katharine sounds like this:
