girls:
91 births since 1916
#5625 (2nd percentile)
boys:
16.1k births since 1880
#914 (80th percentile)
overall:
16.2k births since 1880
#2037 (74th percentile)
The name Barney is the #2,037 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 16,168 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 73.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 73.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #914 (80.1% percentile) for all time with 16,077 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,625 (1.6% percentile) for all time with 91 births since 1916.
Barney has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1916 for girls). Birth data for Barney is available in 132 out of the 141 years between 1880 and 2020 (132 years for boys and 15 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 Barney has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.4% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Barney reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 46.4% percentile (ranked #287) with 299 births per million. The name was most common in 1898, with 553 births per million (ranked 28.4% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2020.
For girls, Barney reached its peak popularity in 1923, achieving the 0.5% percentile (ranked #607) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1916, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1963.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Barney".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Barney.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Barney", 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 Barney.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Barney. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Barney is pronounced as BAHR-nee, 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 Barney? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Barney. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Barney, 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 N 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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