Priscilla is an ancient Roman diminutive of Prisca, a Roman first name meaning ‘ancient’ or ‘venerable’. It originated from the family name Priscus.
Priscilla is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Priscilla 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 girls names, Priscilla ranks 497. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Priscilla. In the entire USA, approximately 115,246 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Priscilla. That is 0.03 % of all living Americans.
Priscilla is an ancient Roman diminutive of Prisca, a Roman first name meaning ‘ancient’ or ‘venerable’. It originated from the family name Priscus.
In the U.S., ... Priscilla celebrated a rise in popularity in the 1940s.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Priscilla annualy. This means that there have been girls named Priscilla 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 women named Priscilla 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 Priscilla even more than any other time: in 1940, it holds its present record of #127 in the ranking of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Priscilla was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Priscilla has never been ranked higher than #127. In 2022, she rivaled the 651 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 407 girls named Priscilla were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Priscilla were born, there have been 1,726 newborns who received this name.
Everyone knows her, everyone loves her and still she’s different from the mainstream: Priscilla occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the more than 50,000 different female first names that occur in the USA, just 537 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Priscilla is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Priscilla is not one of those names that one encounters in every neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, is noticeable and special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 115,228 women and girls of all generations bear the name Priscilla – that is one in 1,338. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Maine, where one in 368 women and girls is called Priscilla, while it is particularly rare in Wyoming, where you have to ask an average of 14,823 women for their name to get Priscilla as an answer once.
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 Priscilla 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 Priscilla 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 Priscilla, you can simply say:
Pig
Rocket
Igloo
Sun
Cat
Igloo
Lion
Lion
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Priscilla
Priscilla
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
P
R
I
S
C
I
L
L
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
R
I
S
C
I
L
L
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. Priscilla sounds like this:
