Zena is a first name for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Zena is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 girls have been named Zena. In the SmartGenius ranking, Zena is #2,304 on the list of most common girls names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Zena.
Zena 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 1885, where the name Zena was given at most four times in the entire USA, perhaps even less or not even once. (If you are Zena and were born in the USA in 1885, 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, Zena even made it into the top 1,000 of our SmartGenius statistics of the most popular girls' names: In 1883, it ranked on position 511 - a popularity it has never reached again since then.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Zena was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Although the name Zena 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 90 times and thus landed on position 1,906 in the SmartGenius ranking of the currently most popular female first names. However, the name is still so rare that the 90 girls with the name Zena, 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 living in the same state as someone with the first name Zena are about the same as betting on heads or tails in a coin toss. This girl’s name is quite popular, but not equally so throughout the entire USA. You can meet girls and women with the name Zena in 24 states – that is about every second of all 50 states in the USA, for example in Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida or Georgia. In relation to the number of residents, the most women and girls with the first name Zena live in New York – here, one in 25,444 bears this beautiful name. In comparison, if we look at all living women and girls in the whole country, only one in 83,517 will turn around if you call her first name Zena.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter Z is quite rare as a first letter for girls' names: only 1.9% of all common girls' names in the US begin with Z. By the way, the most common first letters of girls' names are A, S and M, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of girls' names.
With four letters, the name Zena is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four letters. 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 with 1.9% of all girls' names beginning with a Z, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are girls' names with Z that are quite popular, the most common at present is Zoe.
If your name is Zena 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 Zena, you can simply say:
Zebra
Elephant
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Zena
Zena
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
Z
E
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.
Z
E
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. Zena sounds like this:
