girls:
12.5k births since 1880
#1405 (75th percentile)
boys:
2.4M births since 1880
#9 (100th percentile)
overall:
2.4M births since 1880
#10 (100th percentile)
The name Charles is the #10 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 2,435,467 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #9 (99.8% percentile) for all time with 2,423,009 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #1,405 (75.4% percentile) for all time with 12,458 births since 1880.
Charles has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Charles has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Charles reached its peak popularity in 1924, achieving the 99.3% percentile (ranked #5) with 26,057 births per million. The name was most common in 1880, with 45,169 births per million (ranked 98.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2017, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Charles ranks #52 for boys (94.4% percentile) with 2,946 births per million, which is 6.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Charles reached its peak popularity in 1927, achieving the 41.0% percentile (ranked #356) with 245 births per million. The name was most common in 1927, with 245 births per million (ranked 41.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2016, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Charles ranks #943 for girls (0.4% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 2.1% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Charles".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Charles.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Charles", 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 Charles.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Charles. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 76.9% confident that Charles is pronounced as chahrlz, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is CHAH-ruhlz, at 23.1% 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 Charles? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Charles. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Charles, 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 CH AA1 R L Z) 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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