Raya is a female first name.
The name Raya 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, Raya ranks 817. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Raya. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Raya.
As Raya appears in different cultures independently of each other, the name also has various meanings: In Arabic, it possibly means ‘perfume’ or ‘banner’, in Hebrew, it probably means ‘friend’, and in Hindi ‘flow’. There are many more meanings in other languages.
In 2021, the name Raya jumped... in popularity because of the release of the animated Disney movie 'Raya and the Last Dragon'.
Raya is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Raya cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #372 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2022. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Raya, for there were many years in which not a single parent chose this first name for their daughter. Although it also has never been in the top 100 of most popular first names, Raya seems to have been in vogue for a while, especially since the beginning of the new millennium.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Raya 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 R is neither particularly common nor particularly rare as a first letter for girls' names: 4.1% of all common girls' names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of girls' names are A and S, while X and U are the least common initials of girls' names.
With four letters, the name Raya 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.
Thus, it follows that if 4.1% of all girls' names start with an R, this initial letter occurs about as often as all 26 letters on average. And maybe interesting to know: Rebecca is the girls’ name starting with R, which is the most common of all.
If your name is Raya 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 Raya, you can simply say:
Rocket
Apple
Yoyo
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Raya
Raya
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
R
A
Y
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.
R
A
Y
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. Raya sounds like this:
