The first name Peter stands for ‘the rock’ and is a derivative of the Greek ‘Pétros’.
Peter is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Peter 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, Peter ranks 202. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 11 were named Peter. In total, there are currently 566,176 people – children, adults and seniors – named Peter living in the United States, which is approximately 0.17 % of the entire population.
The first name Peter stands for ‘the rock’ and is a derivative of the Greek ‘Pétros’.
Saint Peter,... one of the Twelve Apostles, is the 'rock' on which Jesus wants to build his church.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Peter is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Peter for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Therefore, Peter is one of the 442 boys' names, that have been given to newborn sons every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Peter is a very special name that peaked in popularity over 100 years ago in the 19th century, ranking in the top 100 boys' names in our SmartGenius first name statistics: Placed at #31 Peter has never been more popular than back in 1880.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Peter was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 1,764 babies were named Peter in the USA in 2022, ranking it #207 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2020, when it was only ranked at #210 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics - back then 1,756 boys were named Peter.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Peter is one of them. However, Peter is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Connecticut seem to particularly fancy this name – the 21,070 men called Peter who live here are 1,14% of all male residents and push their name up to #18 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Connecticut. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 566,176 people with the name Peter. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Peter on position 55 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter P is quite rare as an initial letter for boys' names: only 1.5% of all common boys' names in the US begin with P, which means that this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. But P is by no means the rarest initial. While X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names, the most common first letters of boys' names are J, A and D.
With five letters, the name Peter is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five 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.
From this follows that if 1.5% of all boys' names begin with a P, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Incidentally, of the comparatively few boys' names that begin with a P, Paul is currently the most common.
If your name is Peter 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 Peter, you can simply say:
Pig
Elephant
Tiger
Elephant
Rocket
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Peter
Peter
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
P
E
T
E
R
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
E
T
E
R
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. Peter sounds like this:
