The name Selah comes from a Hebrew word used in the Bible. Its meaning and origin are unknown, but it is probably meant to indicate a musical pause.
Selah is a first name typically given to girls, but in rare cases also used as a boys name.
The name Selah 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, Selah ranks 425. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Selah. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Selah.
The name Selah comes from a Hebrew word used in the Bible. Its meaning and origin are unknown, but it is probably meant to indicate a musical pause.
As a given name,... Selah is used in the U.S. and in the Netherlands.
Selah is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the past, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Then, unexpectedly, Selah cried out for attention, reaching its peak in popularity at #330 in our SmartGenius statistics in the year 2022. People over 50 probably didn't have classmates named Selah, 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, Selah 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 Selah 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 S is a very popular first letter for girls' names. That’s because 9.3% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letter A is more common for girls' names.
With five letters, the name Selah is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five 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.
That means that if 9.3% of all girls' names start with an S, this initial letter occurs nearly three times as often as all other letters on average. And by the way: Of all the girls' names that start with an S, Susan is the most common.
If your name is Selah 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 Selah, you can simply say:
Sun
Elephant
Lion
Apple
Hat
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Selah
Selah
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
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.
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. Selah sounds like this: