The name Orlando is the Italian form of Roland, an Old German name that was popular during the Middle Ages. It can mean ‘famous land’, ‘from the famous land’, but also ‘fame of the land’.
Orlando is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Orlando 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, Orlando ranks 583. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Orlando. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Orlando.
The name Orlando is the Italian form of Roland, an Old German name that was popular during the Middle Ages. It can mean ‘famous land’, ‘from the famous land’, but also ‘fame of the land’.
In the US,... Orlando is a rare name, from about 1970 to 2010 it was somewhat more common.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Orlando annualy. This means that there have been boys named Orlando 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 Orlando have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Orlando even more than any other time: in 1975, it holds its present record at rank #236 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Orlando was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Orlando has never been ranked higher than #236. In 2021, he rivaled the 699 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 333 boys named Orlando were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1991, when possibly the parents of the now very young Orlando were born, there have been 787 newborns who received 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 seven letters, the name Orlando has a typical length for first names in the US. In fact, 26% of all common first names consist of exactly seven letters. 52% of all first names are shorter, while 22% have eight 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.
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 Orlando 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 Orlando, you can simply say:
Orange
Rocket
Lion
Apple
Nut
Dinosaur
Orange
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Orlando
Orlando
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
O
R
L
A
N
D
O
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
N
D
O
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. Orlando sounds like this:
