girls:
608.1k births since 1897
#43 (99th percentile)
boys:
2.1k births since 1939
#2732 (40th percentile)
overall:
610.2k births since 1897
#97 (99th percentile)
The name Brenda is the #97 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 610,223 recorded births since 1897. This represents the 98.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.8% of all names). For girls, it ranks #43 (99.3% percentile) for all time with 608,103 births since 1897. For boys, it ranks #2,732 (40.4% percentile) for all time with 2,120 births since 1939.
Brenda first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1897 (1897 for girls and 1939 for boys). Birth data for Brenda is available in 120 out of the 127 years between 1897 and 2023 (120 years for girls and 66 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 Brenda has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Brenda reached its peak popularity in 1961, achieving the 98.7% percentile (ranked #11) with 11,448 births per million. The name was most common in 1950, with 11,827 births per million (ranked 98.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1995, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Brenda ranks #776 for girls (18.1% percentile) with 101 births per million, which is 0.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Brenda reached its peak popularity in 1961, achieving the 10.1% percentile (ranked #599) with 33 births per million. The name was most common in 1961, with 33 births per million (ranked 10.1% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2007.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Brenda".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Brenda.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Brenda", 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 Brenda.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Brenda. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Brenda is pronounced as BREHN-duh, which has 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 Brenda? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Brenda. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Brenda, 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 R EH1 N D AH0) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker