Merle is a unisex first name, but it has been given primarily to boys for a number of years.
At least in the US, the name Merle is extremely rare. Recently, only a handful of babies has been named Merle each year. That means it’s extremely unlikely that a boy or girl called Merle will meet someone with the same name. So, Merle is a very special name!
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their child Merle annualy. This means that there have been children named Merle who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus people named Merle have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Merle even more than any other time: in 1921, it holds its present record of #309 in the ranking of the most popular first names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Merle was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
The first name Merle has never been ranked higher than #309. In 2022, it rivaled the 8,668 names that preceded it on the list. In total, 0 children named Merle were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Merle were born, there have been 39 newborns who received this name.
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 first names – 7.4% of all common given names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for given names are A and J.
With five letters, the name Merle 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.
That means that with 6.3% of all first names that begin with an M, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average.
If your name is Merle 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 Merle, you can simply say:
Mouse
Elephant
Rocket
Lion
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Merle
Merle
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
E
R
L
E
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
L
E
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. Merle sounds like this:
