Merci is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Merci is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 3 out of 100,000 girls have been named Merci. In the SmartGenius ranking, Merci is #3,188 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 Merci.
In fact, the name Merci did not fit the trend of the last century. Young parents in the 2000s began to change that a bit. After several years of not being given at all (or less than 5 times, because that's the number required for a name to appear in the statistics), Merci seemed to be more popular than ever in 2019. Although the name never ranked higher than #2,156, 74 parents chose it that year, making it a potential new rising star on the horizon of beautiful and rare names. If your name is Merci, you are well on your way to becoming en vogue.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Merci was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, expectant parents chose the yet rare name Merci a few times. Among all newborn girls it ranked #2,218 - with a total of 72 baby girls. This means, as you can see above, that the name is still more common than it was most time of the last century, when it supposedly didn't appear at all for many years - giving girls with this first name a sheen of something particularly contemporary and special.
It is not so easy to find a woman or girl named Merci in the USA. Although the name is not sooooo rare overall, it is only at home in a few selected regions of the USA. In the entire United States there are currently a total of 108 women and girls named Merci, but there are vast areas of the country where not a single person with this name can be found. In fact, the 108 women and girls named Merci live in no more than 6 different states, including for example California, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Tennessee. In all other 43 states, there are no – or, to be precise, less than a handful – women called Merci. (To explain: The official statistics provide the data per state only if at least five women with a specific name live in the same state. So, it’s quite possible that there are one or two states where someone with the name Merci lives although the name is not listed in the official statistics. Should you be one of those rare people whose name is Merci and you live outside the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can improve our statistics.). The state with the most girls and women named Merci relative to its female population is Georgia. And even there, only one in 198,109 women and girls would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Merci.
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 five letters, the name Merci is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five 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 Merci 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 Merci, you can simply say:
Mouse
Elephant
Rocket
Cat
Igloo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Merci
Merci
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
E
R
C
I
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
R
C
I
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. Merci sounds like this:
