Mel is a masculine first name but has increasingly been given to girls in recent years.
Recently, the name Mel 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 boy in 100,000 has been named Mel. That means that a boy named Mel is exceptional and may not meet another person with the same name his 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 Mel.
The odds of having a man or boy named Mel 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 Mel is registered in 19 states, among which are California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois or Indiana. In proportion to the male population, most men and boys with the first name Mel live in California, but even there the name is rather special – on average, you would have to ask 36,132 men and boys in California for their name before you meet one who answers with Mel.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter M is a particularly popular initial letter for boys’ names – 6.2% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for boys’ names are J and A.
With only three letters, the name Mel is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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.
That means that with 6.2% of all boys' names that begin with an M, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average. If you are now wondering which boys’ name with M is the most common... the answer is Michael.
If your name is Mel 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 Mel, you can simply say:
Mouse
Elephant
Lion
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Mel
Mel
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
E
L
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
E
L
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. Mel sounds like this:
