Reuben is a Hebrew name that means ‘behold, a son’ and developed from Re’uven. In England, Reuben is in use since the Protestant Reformation. In many other countries, the variant Ruben is the common one.
Reuben is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Reuben 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, Reuben ranks 819. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 1 were named Reuben. In the entire USA, approximately 22,974 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Reuben. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
Reuben is a Hebrew name that means ‘behold, a son’ and developed from Re’uven. In England, Reuben is in use since the Protestant Reformation. In many other countries, the variant Ruben is the common one.
Reuben was quite popular... around 1920, when the Reuben sandwich roughly invented.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Reuben annualy. This means that there have been boys named Reuben 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 Reuben have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Reuben even more than any other time: in 1880, it holds its present record at rank #141 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Reuben was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Reuben has never been ranked higher than #141. In 2022, he rivaled the 795 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 280 boys named Reuben were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Reuben were born, there have been 249 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter R is quite common as an initial letter for boys’ names. To be precise, 5.2% of all boys' names in the US begin with this letter. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D.
With six letters, the name Reuben is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. 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.
Therefore: As 5.2% of all boys' names start with R, this initial letter occurs much more often than all 26 letters on average. And maybe interesting to know: of all the names that begin with an R, Robert is the most common.
If your name is Reuben 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 Reuben, you can simply say:
Rocket
Elephant
Unicorn
Butterfly
Elephant
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Reuben
Reuben
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
R
E
U
B
E
N
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
E
U
B
E
N
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. Reuben sounds like this:
