Minerva is a first name for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Minerva is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 girls have been named Minerva. In the SmartGenius ranking, Minerva is #2,387 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 Minerva.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Minerva annualy. This means that there have been girls named Minerva 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 women named Minerva have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Minerva even more than any other time: in 1880, it holds its present record of rank #190 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Minerva was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Minerva has never been ranked higher than #190. In 2022, she rivaled the 2,011 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 83 girls named Minerva were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Minerva were born, there have been 84 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 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 seven letters, the name Minerva has a typical length for first names in the US. In fact, 26% of all common first names consist of exactly seven letters. 52% of all first names are shorter, while 22% have eight letters or more. 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 Minerva 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 Minerva, you can simply say:
Mouse
Igloo
Nut
Elephant
Rocket
Violin
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Minerva
Minerva
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
I
N
E
R
V
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
I
N
E
R
V
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. Minerva sounds like this:
