The Dutch and French name Louis derives from the Germanic Hludwig, meaning ‘famous in battle’. It composed of ‘hlut’ for ‘famous, loud’ and ‘wig’ for ‘war, battle’.
Louis is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Louis 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 boys names, Louis ranks 265. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 7 were named Louis. In total, there are currently 371,435 people – children, adults and seniors – named Louis living in the United States, which is approximately 0.11 % of the entire population.
The Dutch and French name Louis derives from the Germanic Hludwig, meaning ‘famous in battle’. It composed of ‘hlut’ for ‘famous, loud’ and ‘wig’ for ‘war, battle’.
The name Louis was... moderately popular in France during the Middle Ages. After the French Revolution, when Louis XVI was guillotined, it became less common.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Louis is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Louis for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Therefore, Louis is one of the 442 boys' names, that have been given to newborn sons every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Louis is a very special name that peaked in popularity over 100 years ago in the 19th century, ranking in the top 100 boys' names in our SmartGenius first name statistics: Placed at #18 Louis has never been more popular than back in 1882.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Louis was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 1,432 babies were named Louis in the USA in 2022, ranking it #240 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2009, when it was only ranked at #338 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics - back then 884 boys were named Louis.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Louis is one of them. However, Louis is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Louisiana seem to particularly fancy this name – the 15,659 men called Louis who live here are 0,532% of all male residents and push their name up to #29 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Louisiana. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 371,435 people with the name Louis. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Louis on position 86 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter L is neither particularly common nor particularly rare as a first letter for boys' names: 4.1% of all common boys' names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters of boys' names are J and A, while X and U are the least common initials of boys' names.
With five letters, the name Louis 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.
Thus, it follows that with 4.1% of all boys' names starting with an L, this initial letter occurs about as often as all 26 letters on average. Nevertheless, there are boys' names with L that are quite common, the most common in the U.S. at present is Larry.
If your name is Louis 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 Louis, you can simply say:
Lion
Orange
Unicorn
Igloo
Sun
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Louis
Louis
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
L
O
U
I
S
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
O
U
I
S
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. Louis sounds like this:
