girls:
2.5k births since 1914
#3486 (39th percentile)
boys:
807k births since 1880
#39 (99th percentile)
overall:
809.5k births since 1880
#64 (99th percentile)
The name Benjamin is the #64 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 809,484 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #39 (99.2% percentile) for all time with 807,016 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,486 (39.0% percentile) for all time with 2,468 births since 1914.
Benjamin has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1914 for girls).
The name Benjamin has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Benjamin reached its peak popularity in 2016, achieving the 99.5% percentile (ranked #6) with 7,247 births per million. The name was most common in 1981, with 7,710 births per million (ranked 95.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Benjamin ranks #11 for boys (98.9% percentile) with 5,555 births per million, which is 72.0% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Benjamin reached its peak popularity in 1983, achieving the 11.8% percentile (ranked #684) with 54 births per million. The name was most common in 1983, with 54 births per million (ranked 11.8% percentile). Despite a low point in 2020, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for girls. Currently, Benjamin ranks #944 for girls (0.3% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 8.5% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Benjamin".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Benjamin.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Benjamin", 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 Benjamin.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Benjamin. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 52.5% confident that Benjamin is pronounced as BEHN-juh-mihn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is BEHN-juh-muhn, at 27.5% confidence, with 3 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 Benjamin? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Benjamin. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Benjamin, 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 N JH AH0 M IH0 N) 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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