Mathilda is a female first name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Mathilda is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 girls have been named Mathilda. In the SmartGenius ranking, Mathilda is #3,450 on the list of most common girls names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Mathilda.
Mathilda 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 1994, where the name Mathilda was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Mathilda and were born in the USA in 1994, 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, Mathilda even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1883, it ranked on position 164 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Mathilda was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Mathilda 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 36 times and thus landed on position 3,569 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 36 girls with the name Mathilda, 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.
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 eight letters, the name Mathilda is long compared to other names. In fact, 14.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly eight letters. 78% of all first names are shorter, while only 8% of all boys’ and girls’ names use nine letters or even more. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long with 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 Mathilda 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 Mathilda, you can simply say:
Mouse
Apple
Tiger
Hat
Igloo
Lion
Dinosaur
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Mathilda
Mathilda
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
A
T
H
I
L
D
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
T
H
I
L
D
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. Mathilda sounds like this:
