Urban is a first name for boys.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Urban is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 boys have been named Urban. In the SmartGenius ranking, Urban is #3,211 on the list of most common boys names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Urban.
Urban 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 2002, where the name Urban was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Urban and were born in the USA in 2002, 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, Urban even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1894, it ranked on position 389 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Urban was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Urban 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 24 times and thus landed on position 3,736 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 24 boys with the name Urban, 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.
The odds of having a man or boy named Urban in your home state are about the same as the chance for a white Christmas in New York City – in both cases they are less than 30%. More precisely, the first name Urban is registered in 16 states, among which are California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa or Kansas. In proportion to the male population, most men and boys with the first name Urban live in Ohio, but even there the name is rather special – on average, you would have to ask 30,624 men and boys in Ohio for their name before you meet one who answers with Urban.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter U is very rare as a first letter for boys' names: only 0.4% of all common boys' names in the US begin with this letter. Only the letter X is even rarer as the first letter of boys' names. By the way, the most common first letters for boys’ names are J and A.
With five letters, the name Urban 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 with 0.4% of all boys' names starting with U, all other letters occur on average more than nine times as often. Moreover, of the comparatively few boys' names that start with U, most of them aren't very common either - the most popular one currently is Uriel.
If your name is Urban 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 Urban, you can simply say:
Unicorn
Rocket
Butterfly
Apple
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Urban
Urban
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
U
R
B
A
N
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.
U
R
B
A
N
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. Urban sounds like this:
