girls:
1.4M births since 1880
#6 (100th percentile)
boys:
4.1k births since 1913
#1899 (59th percentile)
overall:
1.4M births since 1880
#21 (100th percentile)
The name Barbara is the #21 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,440,187 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #6 (99.9% percentile) for all time with 1,436,052 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #1,899 (58.6% percentile) for all time with 4,135 births since 1913.
Barbara has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1913 for boys).
The name Barbara has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Barbara reached its peak popularity in 1943, achieving the 99.8% percentile (ranked #2) with 30,258 births per million. The name was most common in 1938, with 34,410 births per million (ranked 99.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2010, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Barbara ranks #655 for girls (30.9% percentile) with 174 births per million, which is 0.5% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Barbara reached its peak popularity in 1938, achieving the 28.5% percentile (ranked #375) with 143 births per million. The name was most common in 1938, with 143 births per million (ranked 28.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1993.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Barbara".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Barbara.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Barbara", 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 Barbara.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Barbara. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 50.7% confident that Barbara is pronounced as BAHR-ber-uh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is BAHR-bruh, at 44.8% 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 Barbara? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Barbara. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Barbara, 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 B AA1 R B ER0 AH0) 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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