Phil is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
There’s a good chance that a boy named Phil in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Phil in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 boys is named Phil by his parents. In the ranking of most common boys names in recent years, Phil ranks at #5,384. That means there are 5,383 more common boys names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. In the entire USA, approximately 15,230 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Phil. That is 0.00 % of all living Americans.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Phil annualy. This means that there have been boys named Phil 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 Phil 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 Phil even more than any other time: in 1947, it holds its present record at rank #247 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Phil was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Phil has never been ranked higher than #247. In 2022, he rivaled the 7,629 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 8 boys named Phil were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Phil were born, there have been 35 newborns who received this name.
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 four letters, the name Phil 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.
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 Phil 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 Phil, you can simply say:
Pig
Hat
Igloo
Lion
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Phil
Phil
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
P
H
I
L
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
H
I
L
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. Phil sounds like this:
