Nelson comes from an English surname meaning ‘son of Neil’. The popularity of Nelson as a given name has been constant since the 19th century, but quite low.
Nelson is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Nelson isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all boys names, Nelson ranks 610. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Nelson. In the entire USA, approximately 71,208 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Nelson. That is 0.02 % of all living Americans.
Nelson comes from an English surname meaning ‘son of Neil’. The popularity of Nelson as a given name has been constant since the 19th century, but quite low.
Nelson Mandela was... born Rolihlahla Mandela in 1918. In school, he was given the name Nelson by a teacher, as it was common in South Africa at the time to have an English name.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Nelson annualy. This means that there have been boys named Nelson 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 men named Nelson 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 Nelson even more than any other time: in 1882, it holds its present record at rank #127 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Nelson was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Nelson has never been ranked higher than #127. In 2022, he rivaled the 733 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 319 boys named Nelson were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Nelson were born, there have been 801 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: 3.0% of all common boys' names in the US begin with an N. This means that N as the first letter for boys' names is neither particularly common nor rare. The most common first letters of boys' names are J, A and D, while X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names.
With six letters, the name Nelson is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven 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.
Thus, if 3.0% of all boys’ names start with an N, this initial letter is slightly less common than all other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are boys' names with N that are quite common in the U.S., the most common at present is Nicholas.
If your name is Nelson 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 Nelson, you can simply say:
Nut
Elephant
Lion
Sun
Orange
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Nelson
Nelson
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
N
E
L
S
O
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
E
L
S
O
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. Nelson sounds like this:
