The English and Finnish name Jenna is a variant of Jenny, which is a diminutive of Jane. This name is ultimately derived from the Hebrew name Yochanan meaning ‘Yahweh is gracious’.
Jenna is a female first name. In very rare cases it is also used for boys.
The name Jenna 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 girls names, Jenna ranks 326. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 6 were named Jenna. In the entire USA, approximately 145,078 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Jenna. That is 0.04 % of all living Americans.
This is a real surprise! Jenna is a name that has been around for a long time, but only really took off in the 21st century. In the year 2001, it reached its best rank at #44 according to our SmartGenius statistics. This makes Jenna much more popular than in previous generations, where it was so rare for several years that it was not even recorded in the statistics. While the name Jenna was observed for the first time ever in 1915, it now seems to have found its place in the zeitgeist of the 21st century. In 2001, the year of its highest popularity, the name was given a total of 6,148 times. Whether this beautiful girls' name can repeat or even exceed its previous best ranking in the coming years remains to be seen, but the prospects are promising given the positive trend.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Jenna was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, Jenna ranked #580 in our SmartGenius statistics. In absolute figures, this means it was given to newborn girls a total of 461 times. No one knows what names (or combinations of numbers and letters) will be popular 50 years from now, but given its popularity in the early years of this millennium, there is a good chance that Jenna will not disappear from the screen anytime soon.
Everyone knows her, everyone loves her and still she’s different from the mainstream: Jenna occurs in every single state of the U.S. This may sound quite unspectacular at first, but in fact, of the more than 50,000 different female first names that occur in the USA, just 537 are recorded in each individual state, so the name Jenna is definitely something very special. However, at the same time, since the name does not appear in the top 100 most common first names in any single state, Jenna is not one of those names that one encounters in every neighbourhood, but stands out from the crowd, is noticeable and special without being strange or unknown. From Alaska to Florida, a total of 145,050 women and girls of all generations bear the name Jenna – that is one in 1,063. However, there are considerable regional differences – the name is far more popular than average in Alaska, where one in 586 women and girls is called Jenna, while it is particularly rare in Mississippi, where you have to ask an average of 2,719 women for their name to get Jenna as an answer once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter J is a particularly popular initial letter for girls' names. That’s because 6.8% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for girls’ names are A, S and M.
With five letters, the name Jenna is comparatively short. In fact, 17.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly five letters. Only 7% of all first names are even shorter, while 75% have more than five 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 with 6.8% of all girls' names that begin with the letter J, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average. And Jennifer is the girls' name starting with J, which is the most common of all.
If your name is Jenna 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 Jenna, you can simply say:
Joker
Elephant
Nut
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Jenna
Jenna
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
J
E
N
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.
J
E
N
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. Jenna sounds like this:
