Minna is a first name for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Minna is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 girls have been named Minna. In the SmartGenius ranking, Minna is #3,958 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 Minna.
Minna 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 1963, where the name Minna was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Minna and were born in the USA in 1963, 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, Minna even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1889, it ranked on position 358 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Minna was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Minna 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 34 times and thus landed on position 3,718 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 34 girls with the name Minna, 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.
It is not so easy to find a woman or girl named Minna 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 517 women and girls named Minna, but there are vast areas of the country where not a single person with this name can be found. In fact, the 517 women and girls named Minna live in no more than 7 different states, including for example California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. In all other 42 states, there are no – or, to be precise, less than a handful – women called Minna. (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 Minna lives although the name is not listed in the official statistics. Should you be one of those rare people whose name is Minna 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 Minna relative to its female population is New York. And even there, only one in 35,944 women and girls would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Minna.
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 Minna 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 Minna 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 Minna, you can simply say:
Mouse
Igloo
Nut
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Minna
Minna
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
M
I
N
N
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
N
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. Minna sounds like this:
