Kelly is the anglicized form of the Irish given name Ceallach or the surname derived from it, Ó Ceallaigh. The origin is unclear, traditionally, it is believed to stand for ‘bright-headed’.
Kelly is a first name for girls, occasionally also given to boys.
The name Kelly 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, Kelly ranks 501. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Kelly. In total, there are currently 546,804 people – children, adults and seniors – named Kelly living in the United States, which is approximately 0.16 % of the entire population.
Kelly is the anglicized form of the Irish given name Ceallach or the surname derived from it, Ó Ceallaigh. The origin is unclear, traditionally, it is believed to stand for ‘bright-headed’.
Before 1950,... Kelly was exclusively a boy's name.
The name Kelly seems to be an integral part of the U.S. - without Kelly, the Constitution, and basketball, the U.S. would not be the U.S. we love. This is obvious from the fact that Kelly is one of the few names that have been given in the USA in every single year since the beginning of the name statistics and thus since 1880. Of course, Kelly hasn't been equally popular in all 143 years - it was most often given as a baby name before the 2000s: In 1977 it was one of the top 10 most popular baby girl names in the entire United States, ranking #7 on the SmartGenius name statistics.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Kelly was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
468 young parents chose the name Kelly for their newborn child in 2022, placing it at number 571 on the list of most popular girls names - in other words, 570 girls names were given more frequently in 2022. Particularly rare was the name in 1905 - when only 11 parents named their newborn child Kelly in the entire year. This puts it at position 1,067 in our SmartGenius first name statistics.
There are only 537 different women’s names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Kelly is one of them. However, Kelly is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Delaware seem to particularly fancy this name – the 1,640 women called Kelly who live here are 0,550% of all female residents and push their name up to #42, easily placing it in the top 100 most common female names in Delaware.
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 five letters, the name Kelly 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 7.5% 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 Kelly 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 Kelly, you can simply say:
Koala
Elephant
Lion
Lion
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Kelly
Kelly
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
E
L
L
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.
K
E
L
L
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. Kelly sounds like this:
