Sidney was originally an English surname, derived from a place name meaning ‘wide island’. It consists of Old English ‘sid’ for ‘wide’ and ‘eg’ for ‘island’. As a given name, it has traditionally been more masculine than feminine.
Sidney is a unisex first name, but it's given significantly more often to boys than girls.
Few children have been named Sidney in recent years. Although it is used several times each year, only approximately 11 out of 100,000 children are currently called Sidney. Whether you’re a boy or a girl, you will most likely be the only person with the special name Sidney at your school. In our SmartGenius ranking, Sidney is number *** on the list of most common first names.
Sidney was originally an English surname, derived from a place name meaning ‘wide island’. It consists of Old English ‘sid’ for ‘wide’ and ‘eg’ for ‘island’. As a given name, it has traditionally been more masculine than feminine.
In the 1910s,... Sidney was quite popular for boys. Since then, it is rare. Around 2000 the name had a short peak as a girl's name.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their child Sidney annualy. This means that there have been children named Sidney 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 people named Sidney have consistently been special. A small flight of popularity was experienced by the name way back in the last century and in one particular year, parents liked Sidney even more than any other time: in 1912, it holds its present record of #193 in the ranking of the most popular first names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Sidney was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
The first name Sidney has never been ranked higher than #193. In 2022, it rivaled the 1,578 names that preceded it on the list. In total, 165 children named Sidney were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Sidney were born, there have been 752 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter S is a real popular first letter for given names. That’s because 7.7% of all common frist names in the US begin with this letter. Only the first letters A, J and K are more common for first names.
With six letters, the name Sidney is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. 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 if 7.7% of all first names start with an S, this initial letter occurs more than twice as often as all 26 letters on average.
If your name is Sidney 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 Sidney, you can simply say:
Sun
Igloo
Dinosaur
Nut
Elephant
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Sidney
Sidney
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
S
I
D
N
E
Y
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.
S
I
D
N
E
Y
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. Sidney sounds like this:
