Vela is a female first name.
There’s a good chance that a girl named Vela in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Vela in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 girls is named Vela by her parents. In the ranking of most common girls names in recent years, Vela ranks at #5,986. That means there are 5,985 more common girls names, but there are also a few thousand that are even rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Vela.
The first name Vela is a true rarity among all women and girls currently living in the United States – only 132 Americans in total bear this name. And these 132 women are located in only five states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Kentucky and Texas (it should be noted that the official statistics provide the data per state only if there are at least 5 women with this name in the state. So, if your name is Vela and you live outside the states marked on the map, please let us know so we can improve our statistics). The state with the most girls and women named Vela in relation to it’s female population is Kentucky. And yet even there, only one in 121,665 women would raise her hand if you asked, who is called Vela.
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 four letters, the name Vela 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.
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 Vela 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 Vela, you can simply say:
Violin
Elephant
Lion
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Vela
Vela
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
V
E
L
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
E
L
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. Vela sounds like this:
