boys:
2.8k births since 1975
#2400 (48th percentile)
overall:
2.8k births since 1975
#5134 (34th percentile)
The name Bear is the #5,134 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 2,761 recorded births since 1975. This represents the 33.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 33.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #2,400 (47.6% percentile) for all time with 2,761 births since 1975.
Bear first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1975 (first recorded for boys in 1975). Birth data for Bear is available in 27 out of the 49 years between 1975 and 2023. 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.
For boys, Bear reached its peak popularity in 2022, achieving the 33.0% percentile (ranked #619) with 175 births per million. The name was most common in 2022, with 175 births per million (ranked 33.0% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2001, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Bear ranks #626 for boys (31.3% percentile) with 163 births per million, which is 92.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Bear".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Bear.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Bear", 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 Bear.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Bear. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.2% confident that Bear is pronounced as bair, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is bihr, at 9.8% confidence, with 1 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 Bear? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Bear. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Bear, 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 EH1 R) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker