Wilhelm is a first name for boys.
There’s a good chance that a boy named Wilhelm in a medium-sized town will be unique. That’s because only a few babies a year are named Wilhelm in all of the US. Only about one in 100,000 boys is named Wilhelm by his parents. In the ranking of most common boys names in recent years, Wilhelm ranks at #3,628. That means there are 3,627 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 Wilhelm.
Wilhelm 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 1948, where the name Wilhelm was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Wilhelm and were born in the USA in 1948, 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, Wilhelm even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular boys' names: In 1885, it ranked on position 675 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Wilhelm was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Wilhelm 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 33 times and thus landed on position 3,038 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular male first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 33 boys with the name Wilhelm, 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 first name Wilhelm is a true rarity among all men and boys currently living in the United States – only 54 Americans in total bear this name. And these 54 men are located in only five states: California, Iowa, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania (it should be noted that the official statistics provide the data per state only if there are at least 5 men with this name in the state. So, if your name is Wilhelm 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 boys and men named Wilhelm in relation to it’s male population is Iowa. And yet even there, only one in 439,693 men would raise his hand if asked whether there was a Wilhelm present.
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 seven letters, the name Wilhelm 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 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 Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm, you can simply say:
Windmill
Igloo
Lion
Hat
Elephant
Lion
Mouse
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Wilhelm
Wilhelm
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
W
I
L
H
E
L
M
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
I
L
H
E
L
M
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. Wilhelm sounds like this:
