The name Mercy comes from the English word ‘mercy’, ultimately from Latin ‘merces’ for ‘wages, reward’. It is one of the Puritan names, that is in use since the 17th century.
Mercy is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Mercy 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, Mercy ranks 738. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Mercy. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Mercy.
The name Mercy comes from the English word ‘mercy’, ultimately from Latin ‘merces’ for ‘wages, reward’. It is one of the Puritan names, that is in use since the 17th century.
Other Puritan names are for... example Prudence, Charity, Constance and Temperance.
Mercy 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 1906, where the name Mercy was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Mercy and were born in the USA in 1906, 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, Mercy even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1881, it ranked on position 554 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Mercy was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Mercy 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 353 times and thus landed on position 702 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 353 girls with the name Mercy, 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 five letters, the name Mercy 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 Mercy 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 Mercy, you can simply say:
Mouse
Elephant
Rocket
Cat
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Mercy
Mercy
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
E
R
C
Y
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
Y
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. Mercy sounds like this:
