Roland is an Old German name, that exists since at least the 8th century. It is composed of ‘hruod’ meaning ‘fame’ and ‘lant’ meaning ‘land’ and can mean ‘famous land’, ‘from the famous land’, but also ‘fame of the land’.
Roland is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Roland 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, Roland ranks 558. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 3 were named Roland. In the entire USA, approximately 92,350 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Roland. That is 0.03 % of all living Americans.
Roland is an Old German name, that exists since at least the 8th century. It is composed of ‘hruod’ meaning ‘fame’ and ‘lant’ meaning ‘land’ and can mean ‘famous land’, ‘from the famous land’, but also ‘fame of the land’.
Roland has... long been known in the US and was quite popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Since then, the name has become rare.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Roland is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Roland for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Roland is therefore one of only 442 boys’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Roland is a very special name that peaked in popularity some time ago in the 20th century. Placed at #97 Roland easily made it into the top 100 boys' names of our SmartGenius statistics for male first names and has never been more popular than back in 1924.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Roland was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 458 babies were named Roland in the USA in 2022, ranking it at #577 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2006, when it was only ranked #735 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 265 boys were named Roland.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Roland is one of them. However, Roland is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Maine seem to particularly fancy this name – the 3,239 men called Roland who live here are 0,437% of all male residents and push their name up to #59 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Maine. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 92,350 people with the name Roland. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Roland on position 297 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat different, as you can see from the statistics above.
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 Roland 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 Roland 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 Roland, you can simply say:
Rocket
Orange
Lion
Apple
Nut
Dinosaur
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Roland
Roland
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
R
O
L
A
N
D
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
O
L
A
N
D
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. Roland sounds like this:
