Ludwig is a male first name.
There’s a good chance that a boy named Ludwig in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Ludwig in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 boys is named Ludwig by his parents. In the ranking of most common boys names in recent years, Ludwig ranks at #7,050. That means there are 7,049 more common boys names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Ludwig.
Ludwig is not an overly common name, in fact in some of the last 143 years it has been given so infrequently that it doesn't even show up in our statistics (here a name is only recorded in those years in which it was given to newborns at least five times). This was, for example, most recently the case in 2019, where the name Ludwig was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Ludwig and were born in the USA in 2019, please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the 19th century, Ludwig even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1893, it ranked on position 437 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ludwig was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Ludwig has a changeful history, it has clearly arrived in the present. In 2022, the name was given by young parents to their newborn children a remarkable 9 times and thus landed on position 7,071 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 9 boys with the name Ludwig, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is highly likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children with this name.
The odds of having a man or boy named Ludwig in your home state are about the same as the chance for a white Christmas in New York City – in both cases they are less than 30%. More precisely, the first name Ludwig is registered in 12 states, among which are California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan or Minnesota. In proportion to the male population, most men and boys with the first name Ludwig live in New York, but even there the name is rather special – on average, you would have to ask 31,915 men and boys in New York for their name before you meet one who answers with Ludwig.
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 six letters, the name Ludwig is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. 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 Ludwig 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 Ludwig, you can simply say:
Lion
Unicorn
Dinosaur
Windmill
Igloo
Goat
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ludwig
Ludwig
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
L
U
D
W
I
G
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
U
D
W
I
G
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. Ludwig sounds like this:
