Nan is a female first name.
Recently, the name Nan has been given only a handful of times a year and is therefore particularly rare, at least in the US. In recent years, not even one girl in 100,000 has been named Nan. That means that a girl named Nan is exceptional and may not meet another person with the same name her whole life. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Nan.
Nan 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 2021, where the name Nan was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Nan and were born in the USA in 2021, 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, Nan even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1883, it ranked on position 331 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Nan was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Nan 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 6 times and thus landed on position 11,784 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 6 girls with the name Nan, 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.
You may not know anyone named Nan, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 34 states are home to women and girls named Nan. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Nan living in one state or another. If your name is Nan and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Georgia, which has the most people named Nan relative to the population, you still have to ask 11,154 women and girls their names before you hear Nan as an answer just once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter N is neither particularly common nor particularly rare as a first letter for girls' names: 4.1% of all common girls' names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters of girls' names are A and S, while X and U are the least common initials of girls' names.
With only three letters, the name Nan is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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.
Thus, it follows that with 4.1% of all girls' names starting with an N, this initial letter occurs about as often as all 26 letters on average. Nevertheless, there are girls' names with N that are quite common, the most common in the U.S. at present is Nancy.
If your name is Nan 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 Nan, you can simply say:
Nut
Apple
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Nan
Nan
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
N
A
N
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.
N
A
N
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. Nan sounds like this:
