girls:
9.7k births since 1915
#1635 (71st percentile)
boys:
282.9k births since 1880
#131 (97th percentile)
overall:
292.5k births since 1880
#265 (97th percentile)
The name Alex is the #265 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 292,524 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #131 (97.2% percentile) for all time with 282,866 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #1,635 (71.4% percentile) for all time with 9,658 births since 1915.
Alex has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1915 for girls).
The name Alex has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 96.7% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 94.9% of babies named Alex were boys.
For boys, Alex reached its peak popularity in 1995, achieving the 94.2% percentile (ranked #47) with 3,691 births per million. The name was most common in 1993, with 3,699 births per million (ranked 93.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1996, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Alex ranks #199 for boys (78.2% percentile) with 986 births per million, which is 26.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Alex reached its peak popularity in 1995, achieving the 44.8% percentile (ranked #469) with 230 births per million. The name was most common in 1995, with 230 births per million (ranked 44.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Alex ranks #855 for girls (9.7% percentile) with 55 births per million, which is 24.2% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Alex".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Alex.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Alex", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Alex.
Our model has identified 5 different pronunciations for the name Alex. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 30.9% confident that Alex is pronounced as A-lehks, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is A-LEHKS, at 27.3% confidence, with 2 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Alex? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Alex. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Alex, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like AE1 L EH0 K S) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
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