girls:
322 births since 1913
#5394 (6th percentile)
boys:
93k births since 1880
#322 (93rd percentile)
overall:
93.3k births since 1880
#720 (91st percentile)
The name Bob is the #720 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 93,294 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 90.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 90.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #322 (93.0% percentile) for all time with 92,972 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,394 (5.6% percentile) for all time with 322 births since 1913.
Bob has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1913 for girls). Birth data for Bob is available in 143 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (143 years for boys and 42 years for girls). 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 Bob has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Bob reached its peak popularity in 1934, achieving the 86.0% percentile (ranked #75) with 2,333 births per million. The name was most common in 1934, with 2,333 births per million (ranked 86.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Bob ranks #907 for boys (0.4% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 0.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Bob reached its peak popularity in 1932, achieving the 1.9% percentile (ranked #571) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1932, with 14 births per million (ranked 1.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1970.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Bob".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Bob.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Bob", 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 Bob.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Bob. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Bob is pronounced as bahb, which has 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 Bob? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Bob. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Bob, 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 AA1 B) 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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