Wilhelmina is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
Wilhelmina is a well-known name in the US, but is still special. It is currently only given to every ten thousandth girl, and therefore ranks at 1,662 in the SmartGenius statistics. This means there are 1,661 girls names that are more common, but also tens of thousands that are much rarer. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Wilhelmina.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Wilhelmina annualy. This means that there have been girls named Wilhelmina who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus women named Wilhelmina have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Wilhelmina even more than any other time: in 1884, it holds its present record of rank #211 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Wilhelmina was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Wilhelmina has never been ranked higher than #211. In 2022, she rivaled the 1,414 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 136 girls named Wilhelmina were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Wilhelmina were born, there have been 18 newborns who received this name.
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 ten letters, the name Wilhelmina 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 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 Wilhelmina 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 Wilhelmina, you can simply say:
Windmill
Igloo
Lion
Hat
Elephant
Lion
Mouse
Igloo
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Wilhelmina
Wilhelmina
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
W
I
L
H
E
L
M
I
N
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.
W
I
L
H
E
L
M
I
N
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. Wilhelmina sounds like this:
