Nelly is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
Nelly is a well-known name in the US, but is still special. It is currently only given to every ten thousandth girl, and therefore ranks at 1,520 in the SmartGenius statistics. This means there are 1,519 girls names that are more common, but also tens of thousands that are much rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Nelly.
Nelly 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 1911, where the name Nelly was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Nelly and were born in the USA in 1911, 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, Nelly even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1882, it ranked on position 567 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Nelly was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Nelly 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 157 times and thus landed on position 1,288 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 157 girls with the name Nelly, 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.
The odds of living in the same statae as someone named Nelly are about the same as meeting someone with blue eyes in the entire country – both odds are about 25 to 30 %. More precisely, the first name Nelly is registered in 17 states, among which are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida or Georgia. In proportion to the female population, most women and girls with the first name Nelly live in California, and even there the name is rather special – only one in 8,527 would turn around if you called the name Nelly across California.
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 five letters, the name Nelly 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.
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 Nelly 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 Nelly, you can simply say:
Nut
Elephant
Lion
Lion
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Nelly
Nelly
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
N
E
L
L
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.
N
E
L
L
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. Nelly sounds like this:
