girls:
10 births since 1954
#5706 (0th percentile)
boys:
6.9k births since 1880
#1419 (69th percentile)
overall:
6.9k births since 1880
#3242 (58th percentile)
The name Cal is the #3,242 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 6,901 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 58.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 58.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,419 (69.1% percentile) for all time with 6,891 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,706 (0.1% percentile) for all time with 10 births since 1954.
Cal has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1954 for girls). Birth data for Cal is available in 141 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (141 years for boys and 2 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 Cal has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.9% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Cal reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 37.4% percentile (ranked #571) with 203 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 203 births per million (ranked 37.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2008, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Cal is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #571 (37.4% percentile) with 203 births per million.
For girls, Cal reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 0.0% percentile (ranked #723) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 1954, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1955.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Cal".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Cal.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Cal", 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 Cal.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Cal. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Cal is pronounced as kal, 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 Cal? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Cal. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Cal, 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 K AE1 L) 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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