girls:
162.2k births since 1910
#243 (96th percentile)
boys:
451 births since 1914
#4135 (10th percentile)
overall:
162.6k births since 1910
#460 (94th percentile)
The name Chelsea is the #460 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 162,649 recorded births since 1910. This represents the 94.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #243 (95.8% percentile) for all time with 162,198 births since 1910. For boys, it ranks #4,135 (9.8% percentile) for all time with 451 births since 1914.
Chelsea first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1910 (1910 for girls and 1914 for boys). Birth data for Chelsea is available in 86 out of the 114 years between 1910 and 2023 (80 years for girls and 36 years for boys). 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 Chelsea has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Chelsea reached its peak popularity in 1992, achieving the 98.4% percentile (ranked #15) with 8,069 births per million. The name was most common in 1992, with 8,069 births per million (ranked 98.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1993, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Chelsea ranks #579 for girls (38.9% percentile) with 226 births per million, which is 2.8% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Chelsea reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 6.3% percentile (ranked #709) with 23 births per million. The name was most common in 1989, with 23 births per million (ranked 6.3% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2018.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Chelsea".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Chelsea.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Chelsea", 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 Chelsea.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Chelsea. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 67.4% confident that Chelsea is pronounced as CHEHL-see, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is CHEHL-suh, at 15.2% 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 Chelsea? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Chelsea. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Chelsea, 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 EH1 L S 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