The name Keanu is of Hawaiian origin, where it is one of the Top10 popular names. It combines the article ‘ke’ and the word ‘anu’ to ‘the coolness’.
Keanu is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Keanu 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 boys names, Keanu ranks 722. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Keanu. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Keanu.
The name Keanu is of Hawaiian origin, where it is one of the Top10 popular names. It combines the article ‘ke’ and the word ‘anu’ to ‘the coolness’.
The name is strongly associated with... actor Keanu Reeves, whose father is of Hawaiian and Chinese descent.
Keanu is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Keanu cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #490 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2020. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Keanu, for there were many years in which not a single parent chose this first name for their son. Although it also has never been in the top 100 of most popular first names, Keanu seems to have been in vogue for a while, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Keanu was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
485 babies were named Keanu in 2022 - that's 1 in 337,711 newborn boys. With this number, the boys' name Keanu ranked 557 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
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 boys’ names. That’s because 7.9% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters J, A and D are more common for boys' names.
With five letters, the name Keanu 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 if 7.9% of all boys' 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 boys’ names that begin with a K, Kenneth is the most common.
If your name is Keanu 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 Keanu, you can simply say:
Koala
Elephant
Apple
Nut
Unicorn
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Keanu
Keanu
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
E
A
N
U
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
E
A
N
U
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. Keanu sounds like this:
