Valentine is a masculine first name but has increasingly been given to girls in recent years.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Valentine is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 3 out of 100,000 boys have been named Valentine. In the SmartGenius ranking, Valentine is #2,400 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 Valentine.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Valentine annualy. This means that there have been boys named Valentine 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 Valentine 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 Valentine even more than any other time: in 1894, it holds its present record at rank #301 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Valentine was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Valentine has never been ranked higher than #301. In 2022, he rivaled the 1,311 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 127 boys named Valentine were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Valentine were born, there have been 27 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The V is really rare as a first letter for boys' names: only 1.3% of all common boys' names in the US begin with a V. The most common first letters of boys' names, by the way, are J, A and D, while X, U and Q are the least common initials of boys' names.
With nine letters, the name Valentine is relatively long compared to other names. In fact, 5.6% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly nine letters. 92% of all first names are shorter, while not even 2.5% of all boys’ and girls’ names use ten or more letters. 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.
That means that if 1.3% of all boys' names start with a V, all other letters occur on average three times as often as the V. Nevertheless, individual boys' names with V are quite popular, the most common currently being Vincent.
If your name is Valentine 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 Valentine, you can simply say:
Violin
Apple
Lion
Elephant
Nut
Tiger
Igloo
Nut
Elephant
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Valentine
Valentine
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
V
A
L
E
N
T
I
N
E
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.
V
A
L
E
N
T
I
N
E
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. Valentine sounds like this:
