Pat is a unisex first name, but it has been given primarily to boys for a number of years.
At least in the US, the name Pat is extremely rare. Recently, only a handful of babies has been named Pat each year. That means it’s extremely unlikely that a boy or girl called Pat will meet someone with the same name. So, Pat is a very special name!
Pat is not one of the particularly popular names, 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 2022, where the name Pat was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Pat and were born in the USA in 2022 please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the last century, Pat even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular first names: In 1940, it ranked on position 200 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Pat was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter P is pretty rare as an initial letter for first names: only 1.6% of all common first names in the US begin with a P. The most common first letters of given names, by the way, are A, J and K, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of first names.
With only three letters, the name Pat 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.
That means that since 1.6% of all first names begin with a P, this initial occurs less than half as often as the other letters on average.
If your name is Pat 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 Pat, you can simply say:
Pig
Apple
Tiger
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Pat
Pat
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
P
A
T
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.
P
A
T
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. Pat sounds like this:
