Lan is a unisex first name, but it's given significantly more often to girls than boys.
At least in the US, the name Lan is extremely rare. Recently, only a handful of babies has been named Lan each year. That means it’s extremely unlikely that a boy or girl called Lan will meet someone with the same name. So, Lan is a very special name!
Do you know the feeling when you go to the zoo and the animal that is supposed to be in the enclosure is not there? You know it should be there, but you've never seen it? It's the same with Lan. Children named Lan have made themselves scarce. But some parents got a taste for it a few years ago: At No. 2,826 Lan ranked higher than ever before in 1981. By comparison, there have been 86 years in which the first name Lan has not been given at all (or less than 5 times, which is the minimum number required for a name to be included in the statistics), most recently in 2020. In general, parents name their babies Lan only once in a blue moon, so kids and adults with this name can consider themselves exceptional!
In years where the graph has no value, the name Lan was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Lan continues to be a precious jewel: 5 newborns were named Lan that year, ranking #25,193 in the SmartGenius name statistics. If your baby's name is Lan, you must have a flair for beautiful and rare names: Congratulations, your child is sure to feel unique.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter L is quite common as an initial letter for first names. To be precise, 5.5% of all given names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of given names, by the way, are A, J and K.
With only three letters, the name Lan is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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.
Therefore: As 5.5% of all first names start with an L, this initial letter occurs much more often than all 26 letters on average.
If your name is Lan 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 Lan, you can simply say:
Lion
Apple
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Lan
Lan
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
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.
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. Lan sounds like this: