Williams is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Williams is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 2 out of 100,000 boys have been named Williams. In the SmartGenius ranking, Williams is #2,514 on the list of most common boys names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Williams.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Williams annualy. This means that there have been boys named Williams 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 men named Williams 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 Williams even more than any other time: in 1887, it holds its present record at rank #448 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Williams was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Williams has never been ranked higher than #448. In 2022, he rivaled the 2,693 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 40 boys named Williams were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Williams were born, there have been 54 newborns who received this name.
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 eight letters, the name Williams is long compared to other names. In fact, 14.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly eight letters. 78% of all first names are shorter, while only 8% of all boys’ and girls’ names use nine letters or even more. 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 Williams 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 Williams, you can simply say:
Windmill
Igloo
Lion
Lion
Igloo
Apple
Mouse
Sun
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Williams
Williams
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
W
I
L
L
I
A
M
S
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
L
I
A
M
S
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. Williams sounds like this:
