girls:
983 births since 1897
#4733 (17th percentile)
boys:
199.8k births since 1880
#182 (96th percentile)
overall:
200.8k births since 1880
#391 (95th percentile)
The name Bernard is the #391 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 200,782 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #182 (96.0% percentile) for all time with 199,799 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,733 (17.2% percentile) for all time with 983 births since 1897.
Bernard has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1897 for girls).
The name Bernard has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Bernard reached its peak popularity in 1921, achieving the 92.0% percentile (ranked #45) with 3,941 births per million. The name was most common in 1921, with 3,941 births per million (ranked 92.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Bernard ranks #794 for boys (12.9% percentile) with 67 births per million, which is 1.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Bernard reached its peak popularity in 1929, achieving the 4.9% percentile (ranked #563) with 29 births per million. The name was most common in 1929, with 29 births per million (ranked 4.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1993.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Bernard".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Bernard.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Bernard", 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 Bernard.
Our model has identified 5 different pronunciations for the name Bernard. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 59.3% confident that Bernard is pronounced as ber-NAHRD, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is BER-nerd, at 22.2% 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 Bernard? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Bernard. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Bernard, 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 ER0 N AA1 R D) 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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