girls:
313.9k births since 1908
#124 (98th percentile)
boys:
3.8k births since 1880
#2007 (56th percentile)
overall:
317.7k births since 1880
#238 (97th percentile)
The name Allison is the #238 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 317,696 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.9% of all names). For girls, it ranks #124 (97.8% percentile) for all time with 313,885 births since 1908. For boys, it ranks #2,007 (56.2% percentile) for all time with 3,811 births since 1880.
Allison has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1908 for girls). Birth data for Allison is available in 142 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (140 years for boys and 115 years for girls). 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 Allison has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.8% of all recorded births being female. Interestingly, until around 1945, the name was more popular for boys (70.6% boys from 1880 to 1944), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (99.4% girls from 1945 to 2023).
For girls, Allison reached its peak popularity in 2009, achieving the 97.0% percentile (ranked #30) with 3,250 births per million. The name was most common in 1995, with 4,229 births per million (ranked 96.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2012, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Allison ranks #97 for girls (89.9% percentile) with 1,510 births per million, which is 35.7% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Allison reached its peak popularity in 1917, achieving the 13.0% percentile (ranked #450) with 75 births per million. The name was most common in 1896, with 139 births per million (ranked 5.7% 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 "Allison".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Allison.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Allison", 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 Allison.
Our model has identified 5 different pronunciations for the name Allison. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 50.9% confident that Allison is pronounced as A-lih-suhn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is A-luh-suhn, at 20.0% 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 Allison? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Allison. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Allison, 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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