Ma is a first name for girls.
Recently, the name Ma has been given only a handful of times a year and is therefore particularly rare, at least in the US. In recent years, not even one girl in 100,000 has been named Ma. That means that a girl named Ma is exceptional and may not meet another person with the same name her whole life. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Ma.
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 to be there, but you've never seen it? It's the same with Ma. Girls named Ma have made themselves scarce. But some parents got a taste for it many years ago: Reaching pos. 3,065 Ma ranked higher than ever in 1931. By comparison, there have been 86 years in which the first name Ma 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 2022. In general, parents name their daughters Ma only once in a blue moon, so girls and women with this name can consider themselves really special!
In years where the graph has no value, the name Ma was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
The first name Ma is a true rarity among all women and girls currently living in the United States – only 153 Americans in total bear this name. And these 153 women are located in only three states: California, Illinois and Texas (it should be noted that the official statistics provide the data per state only if there are at least 5 women with this name in the state. So, if your name is Ma and you live outside the states marked on the map, please let us know so we can improve our statistics). The state with the most girls and women named Ma in relation to it’s female population is Texas. And yet even there, only one in 149,407 women would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Ma.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter M is a quite popular first letter for girls' names. That’s because 8.5% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters A and S are more common for girls' names.
Being only two letters long, the name Ma is really special. Only 0.2% of all common first names in the US are written with just two letters. On the other hand, 99.8% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than two 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 8.5% of all girls' names start with an M, this initial letter occurs nearly 2.5-times as often as all 26 letters on average – and the most common one of all the girls’ names starting with M is Mary.
If your name is Ma 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 Ma, you can simply say:
Mouse
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Ma
Ma
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
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.
M
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. Ma sounds like this:
