Una is a first name for girls.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Una is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 3 out of 100,000 girls have been named Una. In the SmartGenius ranking, Una is #2,867 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 Una.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Una annualy. This means that there have been girls named Una 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 women named Una 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 Una even more than any other time: in 1890, it holds its present record of rank #320 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Una was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Una has never been ranked higher than #320. In 2022, she rivaled the 2,457 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 62 girls named Una were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Una were born, there have been 14 newborns who received this name.
You may not know anyone named Una, but there’s a good chance you live in the same state as someone with that name. In fact, 30 states are home to women and girls named Una. (To be fair, a given name is only included in a state’s official statistics if there are at least five people with that name living in that state – so it’s entirely possible that there are still a few women and girls named Una living in one state or another. If your name is Una and you live outside of the states highlighted on the map, please let us know so we can refine our statistics even further). And while the first name is present in many states, it is still not one of the popular ones. In Louisiana, which has the most people named Una relative to the population, you still have to ask 6,428 women and girls their names before you hear Una as an answer just once.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter U is the rarest initial for girls' names in the US. Only 0.2% of all common girls' names begin with this letter. Incidentally, the second-rarest first letter of girls' names is X, and the most common first letters are A and S.
With only three letters, the name Una is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three 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 0.2% of all girls' names starting with an X, all other letters occur on average nearly twenty times as often as the U. Moreover, of the comparatively few girls' names that start with X, most of them aren't very common either - the most popular one currently is Ursula.
If your name is Una 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 Una, you can simply say:
Unicorn
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Una
Una
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
U
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.
U
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. Una sounds like this:
