girls:
855.7k births since 1917
#20 (100th percentile)
boys:
15.8k births since 1880
#926 (80th percentile)
overall:
871.6k births since 1880
#55 (99th percentile)
The name Ashley is the #55 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 871,554 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.3% of all names). For girls, it ranks #20 (99.7% percentile) for all time with 855,746 births since 1917. For boys, it ranks #926 (79.8% percentile) for all time with 15,808 births since 1880.
Ashley has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1917 for girls). Birth data for Ashley is available in 143 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (143 years for boys and 85 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 Ashley has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.2% of all recorded births being female. Interestingly, until around 1965, the name was more popular for boys (79.4% boys from 1880 to 1964), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (98.6% girls from 1965 to 2023).
For girls, Ashley reached its peak popularity in 1991, achieving the 100.0% percentile (ranked #1) with 21,383 births per million. The name was most common in 1987, with 29,266 births per million (ranked 99.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1989, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Ashley ranks #123 for girls (87.1% percentile) with 1,243 births per million, which is 4.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Ashley reached its peak popularity in 1980, achieving the 60.9% percentile (ranked #267) with 402 births per million. The name was most common in 1980, with 402 births per million (ranked 60.9% percentile). Despite a low point around 2019, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Ashley ranks #888 for boys (2.5% percentile) with 15 births per million, which is 3.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ashley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ashley.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ashley", 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 Ashley.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Ashley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Ashley is pronounced as ASH-lee, which has 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 Ashley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ashley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ashley, 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 SH L IY0) 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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