Like many other names with the sillable ‘-ley’, Whitley was originally an English surname derived from a place name. It is based on Old English ‘whit’ and ‘leah’ meaning ‘white clearing’. It probably referred to clearings surrounded by birch trees.
Whitley is a first name for girls, occasionally also given to boys.
The name Whitley 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, Whitley ranks 967. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 2 were named Whitley. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Whitley.
Like many other names with the sillable ‘-ley’, Whitley was originally an English surname derived from a place name. It is based on Old English ‘whit’ and ‘leah’ meaning ‘white clearing’. It probably referred to clearings surrounded by birch trees.
Whitley was a rarely used... boy's name since the 1910s until it suddenly became popular for girls in the late 1980s.
Whitley is a phenomenon of Generation X and Y. Previously, the name wasn't really on the radar of expectant parents. Schoolkids of the early 20th century probably didn't have classmates named Whitley - until this very name unexpectedly cried out for attention and peaked in popularity at rank number 419 in 1988. Although it has never reached the top 100 list, this girls' name seems to have been in vogue for a while, which makes Whitley really in tune with her generation.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Whitley was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
377 babies were named Whitley in 2022 - that's 1 in 472,076 newborn girls. With this number, the girls' name Whitley ranked 697 in our SmartGenius first name statistics in 2022, the most recent year for which records are available.
You may not know anyone named Whitley, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 35 states are home to women and girls named Whitley. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Whitley living in one state or another. If your name is Whitley and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Arkansas, which has the most people named Whitley relative to the population, you still have to ask 6,336 women and girls their names before you hear Whitley as an answer just once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The W is really rare as a first letter for girls' names: only 0.8% of all common girls' names in the US begin with a W. The most common first letters of girls' names, by the way, are A, S and M, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of girls' names.
With seven letters, the name Whitley 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.
That means that if 0.8% of all girls' names start with a W, all other letters occur on average five times as often as the W. Nevertheless, individual girls' names with W are quite popular, the most common currently being Wanda.
If your name is Whitley 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 Whitley, you can simply say:
Windmill
Hat
Igloo
Tiger
Lion
Elephant
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Whitley
Whitley
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
W
H
I
T
L
E
Y
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
H
I
T
L
E
Y
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. Whitley sounds like this:
