girls:
324 births since 1919
#5392 (6th percentile)
boys:
13k births since 1880
#1018 (78th percentile)
overall:
13.3k births since 1880
#2272 (71st percentile)
The name Basil is the #2,272 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 13,342 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 70.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 70.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,018 (77.8% percentile) for all time with 13,018 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,392 (5.6% percentile) for all time with 324 births since 1919.
Basil has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1919 for girls).
The name Basil has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 97.6% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 75.3% of babies named Basil were boys.
For boys, Basil reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 42.5% percentile (ranked #308) with 259 births per million. The name was most common in 1911, with 286 births per million (ranked 21.6% percentile). Despite a peak around 2013, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for boys. Currently, Basil ranks #843 for boys (7.5% percentile) with 40 births per million, which is 13.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Basil reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 2.6% percentile (ranked #912) with 16 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 16 births per million (ranked 2.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Basil ranks #928 for girls (2.0% percentile) with 14 births per million, which is 84.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Basil".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Basil.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Basil", 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 Basil.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Basil. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 62.3% confident that Basil is pronounced as BA-zuhl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is BAY-zuhl, at 20.8% 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 Basil? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Basil. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Basil, 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 AE1 Z AH0 L) 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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