girls:
232 births since 1968
#5484 (4th percentile)
boys:
29.8k births since 1926
#670 (85th percentile)
overall:
30k births since 1926
#1465 (81st percentile)
The name Bret is the #1,465 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 30,009 recorded births since 1926. This represents the 81.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 81.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #670 (85.4% percentile) for all time with 29,777 births since 1926. For girls, it ranks #5,484 (4.0% percentile) for all time with 232 births since 1968.
Bret first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1926 (1926 for boys and 1968 for girls). Birth data for Bret is available in 84 out of the 98 years between 1926 and 2023 (84 years for boys and 27 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 Bret has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.2% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Bret reached its peak popularity in 1959, achieving the 74.5% percentile (ranked #168) with 849 births per million. The name was most common in 1959, with 849 births per million (ranked 74.5% percentile). Despite a low point around 1988, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Bret ranks #889 for boys (2.4% percentile) with 15 births per million, which is 1.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Bret reached its peak popularity in 1994, achieving the 1.7% percentile (ranked #831) with 10 births per million. The name was most common in 1994, with 10 births per million (ranked 1.7% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2011.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Bret".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Brett. View all variations of Brett.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Bret", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 4 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Brett" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Brett..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Bret. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Bret is pronounced as breht, 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 Bret? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Bret. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Bret, 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 T) 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