Washington is a first name for boys.
There’s a good chance that a boy named Washington in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Washington in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 boys is named Washington by his parents. In the ranking of most common boys names in recent years, Washington ranks at #5,843. That means there are 5,842 more common boys 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 Washington.
Washington 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 1986, where the name Washington was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Washington and were born in the USA in 1986, 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, Washington even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1884, it ranked on position 307 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Washington was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Washington 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 6,627 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 10 boys with the name Washington, 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 Washington 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 Washington is registered in 13 states, among which are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia or Louisiana. In proportion to the male population, most men and boys with the first name Washington live in South Carolina, but even there the name is rather special – on average, you would have to ask 38,619 men and boys in South Carolina for their name before you meet one who answers with Washington.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter W is quite rare as an initial letter for boys' names: only 1.5% of all common boys' names in the US begin with a W, which means that this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. Nevertheless, W is by no means the rarest initial. While J, A and D are the most common first letters of boys' names, X, U and Q are the least common initials of feminine first names.
With ten letters, the name Washington is obviously a particularly long first name used in the U.S.: only 1.8% of all common first names have exactly ten letters. 98% of all first names are shorter, while only 0.6% of all boys’ and girls’ names need more than ten 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 since 1.5% of all boys’ names begin with a W, this initial occurs less than half as often as the other letters on average. By the way, of the comparatively few boys' names that begin with a W, William is currently the most common.
If your name is Washington 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 Washington, you can simply say:
Windmill
Apple
Sun
Hat
Igloo
Nut
Goat
Tiger
Orange
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Washington
Washington
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
W
A
S
H
I
N
G
T
O
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.
W
A
S
H
I
N
G
T
O
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. Washington sounds like this:
