Philomena is a first name for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Philomena is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 5 out of 100,000 girls have been named Philomena. In the SmartGenius ranking, Philomena is #2,159 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 Philomena.
Philomena 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 1984, where the name Philomena was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Philomena and were born in the USA in 1984 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, Philomena even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1915, it ranked on position 347 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Philomena was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Even though the popularity of the name Philomena has fluctuated in the past and there were years when the name was almost not chosen at all by expectant parents, it has without question arrived in the 21st century. In 2022, the name was given a remarkable 83 times by young parents to their newborn daughters and thus landed at #2,012 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular girls' names. Nevertheless, the name is still so rare that the 83 girls named Philomena, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is most likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children who turn around when someone calls 'Philomena'.
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 girls' names: only 1.6% of all common girls' names in the US begin with a P, which means that this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. Nevertheless, P is by no means the rarest initial. While A, S and M are the most common first letters of girls' names, Q, X and U are the least common initials of feminine first names.
With nine letters, the name Philomena is relatively long compared to other names. In fact, 5.6% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly nine letters. 92% of all first names are shorter, while not even 2.5% of all boys’ and girls’ names use ten or more letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long with no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
That means that since 1.6% of all girls’ names begin with a P, this initial occurs less than half as often as the other letters on average. By the way, of the comparatively few girls' names that begin with a P, Patricia is currently the most common.
If your name is Philomena 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 Philomena, you can simply say:
Pig
Hat
Igloo
Lion
Orange
Mouse
Elephant
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Philomena
Philomena
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
P
H
I
L
O
M
E
N
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.
P
H
I
L
O
M
E
N
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. Philomena sounds like this:
