girls:
2.5k births since 1880
#3477 (39th percentile)
boys:
130 births since 1905
#4456 (3rd percentile)
overall:
2.6k births since 1880
#5246 (32nd percentile)
The name Bell is the #5,246 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 2,612 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 32.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 32.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #3,477 (39.2% percentile) for all time with 2,482 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,456 (2.8% percentile) for all time with 130 births since 1905.
Bell has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1905 for boys). Birth data for Bell is available in 100 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (97 years for girls and 20 years for boys). 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 Bell has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 95.0% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Bell reached its peak popularity in 1890, achieving the 18.7% percentile (ranked #240) with 302 births per million. The name was most common in 1884, with 363 births per million (ranked 18.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Bell ranks #945 for girls (0.2% percentile) with 4 births per million, which is 1.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Bell reached its peak popularity in 1915, achieving the 1.6% percentile (ranked #495) with 15 births per million. The name was most common in 1905, with 56 births per million (ranked 1.2% 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 "Bell".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Belle. View all variations of Belle.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Bell", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 1 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Belle" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Belle..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Bell. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 87.8% confident that Bell is pronounced as behl, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is behll, at 12.2% 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 Bell? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Bell. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Bell, 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 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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