Vanessa is a name, that was invented by author Jonathan Swift for his 1726 poem ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’. It was a rare given name until the mid-20th century, at which point it became popular.
Vanessa is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Vanessa 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, Vanessa ranks 183. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 10 were named Vanessa. In the entire USA, approximately 256,478 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Vanessa. That is 0.08 % of all living Americans.
Vanessa is a name, that was invented by author Jonathan Swift for his 1726 poem ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’. It was a rare given name until the mid-20th century, at which point it became popular.
Jonathan Swift was... was an Anglo-Irish satirist and author, who lived from 1667 to 1745. He is known for his deadpan, ironic writing style.
This was a real surprise! Vanessa is a name that has been around for a long time, but only really took off at the end of the 20th century. According to our SmartGenius statistics, it reached its highest rank at #41 in the year 1988, when 7,587 parents chose this name for their newborn daughter. This made Vanessa much more popular than in previous generations, where it was so rare for several years that it was not even recorded in the statistics. Now, this name seems to have found its place and has established itself in the beginning of the 21st century as well.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Vanessa was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Vanessa ranked 286 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to baby girls a total of 1,021 times. No one knows what names (or combinations of numbers and letters) will be popular 50 years from now, but given its consistent popularity, there is a good chance that Vanessa will remain a universally popular name.
There are only 537 different women’s names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Vanessa is one of them. However, Vanessa is not equally widespread in all states, but people in California seem to particularly fancy this name – the 62,658 women called Vanessa who live here are 0,420% of all female residents and push their name up to #32, easily placing it in the top 100 most common female names in California.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter V is quite rare as an initial letter for girls' names: only 1.6% of all common girls' names in the US begin with V, which means that this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. But V is by no means the rarest initial. While Q, X and U are the least common initials of girls' names, the most common first letters of girls' names are A, S and M.
With seven letters, the name Vanessa has a typical length for first names in the US. In fact, 26% of all common first names consist of exactly seven letters. 52% of all first names are shorter, while 22% have eight letters or more. 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.
From this follows that if 1.6% of all girls' names begin with a V, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Incidentally, of the comparatively few girls' names that begin with a V, Virginia is currently the most common.
If your name is Vanessa 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 Vanessa, you can simply say:
Violin
Apple
Nut
Elephant
Sun
Sun
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Vanessa
Vanessa
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
V
A
N
E
S
S
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.
V
A
N
E
S
S
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. Vanessa sounds like this:
