girls:
4.6k births since 1943
#2520 (56th percentile)
boys:
1.2M births since 1909
#25 (99th percentile)
overall:
1.2M births since 1909
#32 (100th percentile)
The name Brian is the #32 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,176,194 recorded births since 1909. This represents the 99.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #25 (99.5% percentile) for all time with 1,171,631 births since 1909. For girls, it ranks #2,520 (55.9% percentile) for all time with 4,563 births since 1943.
Brian first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1909 (1909 for boys and 1943 for girls). Birth data for Brian is available in 114 out of the 115 years between 1909 and 2023 (114 years for boys and 71 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 Brian has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Brian reached its peak popularity in 1977, achieving the 99.0% percentile (ranked #8) with 19,008 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 22,116 births per million (ranked 98.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1976, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Brian ranks #302 for boys (66.9% percentile) with 570 births per million, which is 2.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Brian reached its peak popularity in 1977, achieving the 22.8% percentile (ranked #593) with 110 births per million. The name was most common in 1977, with 110 births per million (ranked 22.8% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2015.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Brian".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Brian.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Brian", 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 Brian.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Brian. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 84.1% confident that Brian is pronounced as BRAI-uhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is BREE-uhn, at 15.9% 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 Brian? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Brian. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Brian, 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 AY1 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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