girls:
258 births since 1918
#5458 (4th percentile)
overall:
258 births since 1918
#7481 (3rd percentile)
The name California is the #7,481 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 258 recorded births since 1918. This represents the 3.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 3.3% of all names). For girls, it ranks #5,458 (4.5% percentile) for all time with 258 births since 1918.
California first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1918 (first recorded for girls in 1918). Birth data for California is available in 26 out of the 106 years between 1918 and 2023. 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.
For girls, California reached its peak popularity in 2017, achieving the 1.2% percentile (ranked #938) with 8 births per million. The name was most common in 2017, with 8 births per million (ranked 1.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2019, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, California ranks #947 for girls (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 33.7% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "California".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of California.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "California", 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 California.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name California. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 73.5% confident that California is pronounced as ka-luh-FOR-nyuh, which has 4 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ka-lee-FOR-nee-uh, at 26.5% confidence, with 5 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 California? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with California. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for California, 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 AE2 L AH0 F AO1 R N Y 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.
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