girls:
10.6k births since 1901
#1533 (73rd percentile)
boys:
23.8k births since 1880
#745 (84th percentile)
overall:
34.4k births since 1880
#1354 (83rd percentile)
The name Charley is the #1,354 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 34,395 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 82.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 82.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #745 (83.8% percentile) for all time with 23,796 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #1,533 (73.2% percentile) for all time with 10,599 births since 1901.
Charley has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1901 for girls).
The name Charley has been given to both genders, with a slight preference for boys (69.2% of all recorded births). In 2023, 20.0% of babies named Charley were boys. Interestingly, until around 1989, the name was more popular for boys (95.8% boys from 1880 to 1988), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (80.6% girls from 1989 to 2023).
For boys, Charley reached its peak popularity in 1880, achieving the 73.8% percentile (ranked #54) with 2,576 births per million. The name was most common in 1880, with 2,576 births per million (ranked 73.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Charley ranks #820 for boys (10.0% percentile) with 52 births per million, which is 2.0% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Charley reached its peak popularity in 2014, achieving the 53.4% percentile (ranked #451) with 328 births per million. The name was most common in 2014, with 328 births per million (ranked 53.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2017, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Charley ranks #588 for girls (37.9% percentile) with 220 births per million, which is 67.2% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Charley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Charlie. View all variations of Charlie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Charley", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 12 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Charlie" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Charlie..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Charley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Charley is pronounced as CHAHR-lee, which has 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 Charley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Charley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Charley, 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 IY0) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker