The name Rex comes from Latin ‘rex’ meaning ‘king’. It was originally a title and has been used as a given name since the 19th century.
Rex is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Rex 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, Rex ranks 613. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 2 were named Rex. In the entire USA, approximately 54,083 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Rex. That is 0.02 % of all living Americans.
The name Rex comes from Latin ‘rex’ meaning ‘king’. It was originally a title and has been used as a given name since the 19th century.
This strong sounding... name was at its most popular around 1950.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Rex annualy. This means that there have been boys named Rex 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 Rex 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 Rex even more than any other time: in 1951, it holds its present record at rank #166 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Rex was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Rex has never been ranked higher than #166. In 2022, he rivaled the 653 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 377 boys named Rex were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Rex were born, there have been 207 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 only three letters, the name Rex is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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.
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 Rex 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 Rex, you can simply say:
Rocket
Elephant
Xylophone
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Rex
Rex
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
R
E
X
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
X
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. Rex sounds like this:
