Olaf is a first name for boys.
There’s a good chance that a boy named Olaf in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Olaf in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 boys is named Olaf by his parents. In the ranking of most common boys names in recent years, Olaf ranks at #6,281. That means there are 6,280 more common boys names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Olaf.
Olaf 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 1989, where the name Olaf was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Olaf and were born in the USA in 1989, 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, Olaf even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1885, it ranked on position 363 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Olaf was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Olaf 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 9,177 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 6 boys with the name Olaf, 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.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter O is pretty rare as an initial letter for boys' names: only 1.8% of all common boys' names in the US begin with an O. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D, while X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names.
With four letters, the name Olaf is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four 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.
That means that since 1.8% of all boys’ names begin with an O, this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are of course single names beginning with an O, which are quite popular
If your name is Olaf 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 Olaf, you can simply say:
Orange
Lion
Apple
Fox
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Olaf
Olaf
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
O
L
A
F
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.
O
L
A
F
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. Olaf sounds like this:
