Tena is a female first name.
Recently, the name Tena has been given only a handful of times a year and is therefore particularly rare, at least in the US. In recent years, not even one girl in 100,000 has been named Tena. That means that a girl named Tena is exceptional and may not meet another person with the same name her whole life. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Tena.
Tena is not an overly common name, in fact in some of the last 143 years it has been given so infrequently that it doesn't even show up in our statistics (here a name is only recorded in those years in which it was given to newborns at least five times). This was, for example, most recently the case in 2015, where the name Tena was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Tena and were born in the USA in 2015, please get in touch with us!) Before that, however, there was a time when the name was significantly more popular - way back in the 19th century, Tena even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1883, it ranked on position 309 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Tena was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Tena has a changeful history, it has clearly arrived in the present. In 2022, the name was given by young parents to their newborn children a remarkable 10 times and thus landed on position 8,408 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 10 girls with the name Tena, who are celebrating their second birthday this year, can rightly feel very special, because it is highly likely that in their kindergarten they will be the only children with this name.
You may not know anyone named Tena, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 33 states are home to women and girls named Tena. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Tena living in one state or another. If your name is Tena and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Arkansas, which has the most people named Tena relative to the population, you still have to ask 10,898 women and girls their names before you hear Tena as an answer just once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter T is a quite popular first letter for girls' names. Because: 6.3% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for girls’ names are A, S and M.
With four letters, the name Tena is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four 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.
With 6.3% of all girls' names that begin with a T, this first letter is thus much more common than all 26 letters on average - and the most popular one of all the girls’ names starting with T is Teresa.
If your name is Tena 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 Tena, you can simply say:
Tiger
Elephant
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Tena
Tena
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
T
E
N
A
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.
T
E
N
A
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. Tena sounds like this:
