The name Kenya was taken from the name of the African country, which is named after Mount Kenya. In the Kikuyu language, it is called ‘Kĩrĩnyaga’ meaning ‘the one having stripes’. Mount Kenya is an extinct volcano.
Kenya is a female first name. In some cases it's also given to boys.
The name Kenya 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, Kenya ranks 827. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Kenya. In the entire USA, approximately 23,650 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Kenya. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
The name Kenya was taken from the name of the African country, which is named after Mount Kenya. In the Kikuyu language, it is called ‘Kĩrĩnyaga’ meaning ‘the one having stripes’. Mount Kenya is an extinct volcano.
As a given name,... Kenya is in use since the 1960s.
Kenya is a quite familiar phenomenon. Before 1900, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. It took a while, but then, unexpectedly, Kenya cried out for attention, reaching rank 237 in 1973. So, schoolkids of the late 19th century probably didn't have classmates named Kenya and it has never reached the top 100 list in our statistics, but for a while it became more and more fashionable in the last century, which makes Kenya really in tune with her generation.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Kenya was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
165 babies were named Kenya in 2022 - that's 1 in 898,375 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Kenya ranked 1,256 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which first records are available.
You may not know anyone named Kenya, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 37 states are home to women and girls named Kenya. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Kenya living in one state or another. If your name is Kenya and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Georgia, which has the most people named Kenya relative to the population, you still have to ask 2,838 women and girls their names before you hear Kenya as an answer just once.
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 Kenya 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 Kenya 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 Kenya, you can simply say:
Koala
Elephant
Nut
Yoyo
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Kenya
Kenya
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
K
E
N
Y
A
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
Y
A
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. Kenya sounds like this:
