Orla is a first name for girls, occasionally also given to boys.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Orla 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 Orla. In the SmartGenius ranking, Orla is #3,786 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 Orla.
It is not so easy to find a woman or girl named Orla in the USA. Although the name is not sooooo rare overall, it is only at home in a few selected regions of the USA. In the entire United States there are currently a total of 159 women and girls named Orla, but there are vast areas of the country where not a single person with this name can be found. In fact, the 159 women and girls named Orla live in no more than 6 different states, including for example California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York. In all other 43 states, there are no – or, to be precise, less than a handful – women called Orla. (To explain: The official statistics provide the data per state only if at least five women with a specific name live in the same state. So, it’s quite possible that there are one or two states where someone with the name Orla lives although the name is not listed in the official statistics. Should you be one of those rare people whose name is Orla and you live outside the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can improve our statistics.). The state with the most girls and women named Orla relative to its female population is Massachusetts. And even there, only one in 140,948 women and girls would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Orla.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter O is quite rare as an initial letter for first names: only 1.5% of all common given names in the US begin with an O, which means that this initial occurs less than half as often as the other letters on average. Nevertheless, O is by no means the rarest initial. While A, J and K are the most common first letters of given names, U, X and Q are the least common initials of first names.
With four letters, the name Orla 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.
Now do the math: Since 1.5% of all first names begin with an O, this initial occurs less than half as often as the other letters on average.
If your name is Orla 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 Orla, you can simply say:
Orange
Rocket
Lion
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Orla
Orla
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
O
R
L
A
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
R
L
A
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. Orla sounds like this:
