girls:
115.6k births since 1905
#329 (94th percentile)
boys:
590 births since 1913
#3996 (13th percentile)
overall:
116.1k births since 1905
#611 (92nd percentile)
The name Alison is the #611 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 116,148 recorded births since 1905. This represents the 92.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 92.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #329 (94.3% percentile) for all time with 115,558 births since 1905. For boys, it ranks #3,996 (12.8% percentile) for all time with 590 births since 1913.
Alison first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1905 (1905 for girls and 1913 for boys). Birth data for Alison is available in 115 out of the 119 years between 1905 and 2023 (115 years for girls and 65 years for boys). The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
The name Alison has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.5% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Alison reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 88.7% percentile (ranked #93) with 1,612 births per million. The name was most common in 1979, with 1,705 births per million (ranked 87.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2012, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Alison ranks #423 for girls (55.4% percentile) with 372 births per million, which is 21.8% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Alison reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 3.4% percentile (ranked #731) with 13 births per million. The name was most common in 1913, with 13 births per million (ranked 0.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Alison".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Allison. View all variations of Allison.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Alison", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 43 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Allison" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Allison..
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Alison. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 57.8% confident that Alison is pronounced as A-lih-suhn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is A-luh-suhn, at 28.9% confidence, with 3 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 Alison? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Alison. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Alison, 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 IH0 S AH0 N) 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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