girls:
7.7k births since 1880
#1858 (67th percentile)
boys:
106.7k births since 1880
#292 (94th percentile)
overall:
114.4k births since 1880
#617 (92nd percentile)
The name Cecil is the #617 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 114,431 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 92.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 92.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #292 (93.6% percentile) for all time with 106,744 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #1,858 (67.5% percentile) for all time with 7,687 births since 1880.
Cecil has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Cecil has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 93.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Cecil reached its peak popularity in 1920, achieving the 86.0% percentile (ranked #76) with 2,234 births per million. The name was most common in 1902, with 2,667 births per million (ranked 73.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Cecil ranks #801 for boys (12.1% percentile) with 63 births per million, which is 2.4% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Cecil reached its peak popularity in 1916, achieving the 36.9% percentile (ranked #362) with 222 births per million. The name was most common in 1897, with 556 births per million (ranked 36.3% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Cecil".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Cecil.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Cecil", 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 Cecil.
Our model has identified 5 different pronunciations for the name Cecil. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 46.3% confident that Cecil is pronounced as SEH-suhl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SEE-suhl, at 35.2% 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 Cecil? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Cecil. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Cecil, 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 S EH1 S AH0 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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