The name Lee comes from a surname that was derived from Old English ‘leah’ meaning ‘clearing’ or ‘meadow’. It is also used as a pet name of various names such as Beverly, Kimberly or Leslie.
Lee is a unisex first name, but it has been given primarily to boys for a number of years.
Few children have been named Lee in recent years. Although it is used several times each year, only approximately 11 out of 100,000 children are currently called Lee. Whether you’re a boy or a girl, you will most likely be the only person with the special name Lee at your school. In our SmartGenius ranking, Lee is number *** on the list of most common first names.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Lee is a staple in the country: Kids have been given the name Lee for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Lee is therefore one of the 910 first names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Lee is a very special name that peaked in popularity over 100 years ago in the 19th century, ranking in the top 100 first names in our SmartGenius first name statistics: With #99 Lee has never been more popular than back in 1882.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Lee was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 402 babies were named Lee in the USA in 2022, ranking it #1,380 on the list of the most popular first names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2019, when it was only ranked #1,587 of all first names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 315 kids were named Lee.
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 Lee 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 Lee 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 Lee, you can simply say:
Lion
Elephant
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Lee
Lee
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
L
E
E
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.
L
E
E
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. Lee sounds like this:
