girls:
945 births since 1992
#4771 (17th percentile)
boys:
10k births since 1880
#1169 (75th percentile)
overall:
10.9k births since 1880
#2519 (67th percentile)
The name Boston is the #2,519 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 10,935 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 67.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 67.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,169 (74.5% percentile) for all time with 9,990 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,771 (16.5% percentile) for all time with 945 births since 1992.
Boston has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1992 for girls). Birth data for Boston is available in 101 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (101 years for boys and 32 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 Boston has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 91.4% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 91.3% of babies named Boston were boys.
For boys, Boston reached its peak popularity in 2012, achieving the 46.7% percentile (ranked #480) with 240 births per million. The name was most common in 2020, with 250 births per million (ranked 43.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Boston ranks #534 for boys (41.4% percentile) with 234 births per million, which is 93.8% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Boston reached its peak popularity in 2014, achieving the 6.2% percentile (ranked #907) with 33 births per million. The name was most common in 2014, with 33 births per million (ranked 6.2% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Boston ranks #911 for girls (3.8% percentile) with 23 births per million, which is 70.5% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Boston".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Boston.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Boston", 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 Boston.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Boston. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 64.0% confident that Boston is pronounced as BAW-stuhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is BAH-stuhn, at 36.0% 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 Boston? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Boston. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Boston, 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 AO1 S T AH0 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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