The name Sterling comes from a Scottish surname that was derived from city of Stirling, which is itself of unknown meaning.
Sterling is a male first name. In some cases it's also given to girls.
The name Sterling 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, Sterling ranks 426. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 4 were named Sterling. In the entire USA, approximately 29,713 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Sterling. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
The name Sterling comes from a Scottish surname that was derived from city of Stirling, which is itself of unknown meaning.
It may also derive... from the Old English 'staerling', referring to the bird, starling.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Sterling annualy. This means that there have been boys named Sterling 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 Sterling 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 Sterling even more than any other time: in 1895, it holds its present record at rank #288 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Sterling was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Sterling has never been ranked higher than #288. In 2022, he rivaled the 333 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 959 boys named Sterling were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Sterling were born, there have been 503 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter S is a quite popular first letter for boys’ names. Because: 5.9% of all common boys’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for boys’ names are J, A and D.
With eight letters, the name Sterling is long compared to other names. In fact, 14.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly eight letters. 78% of all first names are shorter, while only 8% of all boys’ and girls’ names use nine letters or even more. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long with no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
This means that with 5.9% of all boys' names that begin with an S, this first letter is much more common than all 26 letters on average - and the most popular one of all the boys’ names starting with S is Steven.
If your name is Sterling 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 Sterling, you can simply say:
Sun
Tiger
Elephant
Rocket
Lion
Igloo
Nut
Goat
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Sterling
Sterling
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. Sterling sounds like this: