The name Martha comes from Aramaic and means ‘lady, mistress’. It is widely known in many European languages, including Swedish, Dutch, German, Greek and various Slavic languages.
Martha is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Martha 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 girls names, Martha ranks 684. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Martha. In total, there are currently 491,271 people – children, adults and seniors – named Martha living in the United States, which is approximately 0.15 % of the entire population.
The name Martha comes from Aramaic and means ‘lady, mistress’. It is widely known in many European languages, including Swedish, Dutch, German, Greek and various Slavic languages.
Aramaic is an old Semitic... language, that originated in what is today Iraq, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Martha is a staple in the country: Girls have been given the name Martha for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Martha is therefore one of the 432 girls’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Martha is a very special name that peaked in popularity over 100 years ago in the 19th century, ranking in the top 100 girls' names in our SmartGenius first name statistics: With #14 Martha has never been more popular than back in 1882.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Martha was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 402 babies were named Martha in the USA in 2022, ranking it #661 on the list of the most popular girls' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2013, when it was only ranked #750 of all female names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 342 girls were named Martha.
There are only 537 different women’s names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Martha is one of them. However, Martha is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Alabama seem to particularly fancy this name – the 21,345 women called Martha who live here are 0,764% of all female residents and push their name up to #11, easily placing it in the top 100 most common female names in Alabama.
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.
With six letters, the name Martha 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.
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 Martha 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 Martha, you can simply say:
Mouse
Apple
Rocket
Tiger
Hat
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Martha
Martha
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
A
R
T
H
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
R
T
H
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. Martha sounds like this:
