Hugo is an Old German name that means ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’. It is in use since at least the 8th century.
Hugo is a male first name. In very rare cases it is also used for girls.
The name Hugo 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 boys names, Hugo ranks 407. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 4 were named Hugo. In the entire USA, approximately 30,296 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Hugo. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their son Hugo annualy. This means that there have been boys named Hugo 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 Hugo 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 Hugo even more than any other time: in 1883, it holds its present record at rank #247 in the list of the most popular boys' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Hugo was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Hugo has never been ranked higher than #247. In 2022, he rivaled the 386 names that preceded him on the list. In total, 794 boys named Hugo were born in this year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Hugo were born, there have been 613 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter H is not particularly common as a first letter for boys' names: only 2.9% of all common boys' names in the US begin with an H. The most common first letters for boys' names are J and A, while X and U are the least common first letters of boys' names.
With four letters, the name Hugo 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.
This means that if 2.9% of all boys' names begin with an H, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Nevertheless, there are of course some names that begin with H and are extremely popular, for example Henry, currently the most common boys’ name with H.
If your name is Hugo 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 Hugo, you can simply say:
Hat
Unicorn
Goat
Orange
The NATO alphabet often helps people spell words on the phone or radio when there are communication problems.
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Hugo
Hugo
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
H
U
G
O
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.
H
U
G
O
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. Hugo sounds like this:
