Kenan is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
Kenan is a well-known name in the US, but is still special. It is currently only given to every ten thousandth boy, and therefore ranks at 1318 in the SmartGenius statistics. This means there are 1,317 boys names that are more common, but also tens of thousands that are much rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Kenan.
Kenan is a phenomenon of Generation X and Y. Previously, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Schoolkids of the early 20th century probably didn't have classmates named Kenan - until this very name unexpectedly cried out for attention and peaked in popularity at rank number 901 in 1997. Although it has never reached the top 100 list, this boys' name seems to have been in vogue for a while, which makes Kenan really in tune with his generation.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Kenan was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
168 babies were named Kenan in 2022 - that's 1 in 960,869 newborn boys. With this number, the boys' name Kenan ranked 1,100 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
The odds that a man or boy named Kenan lives in your home state are about the same as betting on heads or tails in a coin toss. This boy’s name is quite popular, but not equally so throughout the entire USA. You can meet boys and men with the name Kenan in 22 states – which is obviously nearly every second of all 50 states in the USA, for example in Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia or Illinois. In relation to the number of residents, the most men and boys with the first name Kenan live in North Carolina – here, one in 16,035 bears this name. In comparison, if we look at all living men and boys in the whole country, only one in 91,415 will turn around if you call his first name Kenan.
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 Kenan 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 Kenan 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 Kenan, you can simply say:
Koala
Elephant
Nut
Apple
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Kenan
Kenan
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
E
N
A
N
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
N
A
N
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. Kenan sounds like this:
