Presented by

The first name 
Ona

Ona is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.

When two girls called Ona meet...

… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Ona 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 Ona. In the SmartGenius ranking, Ona is #4,108 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 Ona.

You won't believe all there is 
to discover about the name
 
Ona

Ona -
evergreen, but special

For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Ona annualy. This means that there have been girls named Ona 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 women named Ona 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 Ona even more than any other time: in 1893, it holds its present record of rank #292 in the list of the most popular girls' names.

In years where the graph has no value, the name Ona was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.

How popular was Ona 2022 among young parents?

Ona has never been ranked higher than #292. In 2022, she rivaled the 4,218 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 28 girls named Ona were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Ona were born, there have been 11 newborns who received this name.

Ona -
special, but at home in many states

You may not know anyone named Ona, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 28 states are home to women and girls named Ona. (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 Ona living in one state or another. If your name is Ona 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 Oklahoma, which has the most people named Ona relative to the population, you still have to ask 7,830 women and girls their names before you hear Ona as an answer just once.

Ona has 3 letters 
and begins with an O

Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter O is quite rare as a first letter for girls' names: only 1.0% of all common girls' names in the US begin with an O. By the way, the most common first letters of girls' names are A, S and M, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of girls' names.

With only three letters, the name Ona 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.

Therefore: As 1.0% of all girls' names begin with an O, this initial letter is significantly less common than the other letters on average. However, individual girls' names with O are really popular, the most common currently being Olivia.

Other names with 
O, n and a

If you take all the letters in the name Ona – O, n and a – and put them together again, you can form other names, such as Noa or Nao.

With hands, flags and sounds 
How to say Ona

If your name is Ona 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...

This is how you spell the name Ona

So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Ona, you can simply say:

Orange

Nut

Apple

This is how the name Ona is spelled in the NATO phonetic alphabet

The NATO alphabet often helps people spell words on the phone or radio when there are communication problems.

How do you write Ona in Braille?

Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.

Ona

Ona

You want to tell a deaf person that your name is Ona

Just use American Sign Language!

The name Ona is particularly colorful in the Semaphore flag signaling system!

These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.

O
N
A

Have you ever waved the name Ona

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
N
A

Beeping like crazy...

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. Ona sounds like this: