girls:
1.9k births since 1896
#3926 (31st percentile)
boys:
270.8k births since 1880
#137 (97th percentile)
overall:
272.6k births since 1880
#289 (96th percentile)
The name Allen is the #289 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 272,635 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #137 (97.0% percentile) for all time with 270,769 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,926 (31.3% percentile) for all time with 1,866 births since 1896.
Allen has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1896 for girls).
The name Allen has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Allen reached its peak popularity in 1950, achieving the 88.3% percentile (ranked #71) with 2,662 births per million. The name was most common in 1947, with 2,732 births per million (ranked 87.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1984, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Allen ranks #458 for boys (49.8% percentile) with 310 births per million, which is 11.4% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Allen reached its peak popularity in 1925, achieving the 5.1% percentile (ranked #583) with 29 births per million. The name was most common in 1914, with 31 births per million (ranked 3.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2020.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Allen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Alan. View all variations of Alan.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Allen", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 19 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Alan" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Alan..
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Allen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 81.0% confident that Allen is pronounced as A-luhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is uh-LUHN, at 11.9% 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 Allen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Allen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Allen, 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 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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