girls:
439.5k births since 1909
#79 (99th percentile)
boys:
979 births since 1939
#3613 (21st percentile)
overall:
440.4k births since 1909
#158 (98th percentile)
The name Cheryl is the #158 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 440,438 recorded births since 1909. This represents the 98.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.0% of all names). For girls, it ranks #79 (98.6% percentile) for all time with 439,459 births since 1909. For boys, it ranks #3,613 (21.2% percentile) for all time with 979 births since 1939.
Cheryl first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1909 (1909 for girls and 1939 for boys). Birth data for Cheryl is available in 111 out of the 115 years between 1909 and 2023 (111 years for girls and 46 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 Cheryl has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Cheryl reached its peak popularity in 1958, achieving the 98.4% percentile (ranked #13) with 11,677 births per million. The name was most common in 1958, with 11,677 births per million (ranked 98.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1959, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Cheryl ranks #921 for girls (2.7% percentile) with 18 births per million, which is 0.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Cheryl reached its peak popularity in 1958, achieving the 8.1% percentile (ranked #611) with 27 births per million. The name was most common in 1958, with 27 births per million (ranked 8.1% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1990.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Cheryl".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Cheryl.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Cheryl", 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 Cheryl.
Our model has identified 6 different pronunciations for the name Cheryl. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 44.9% confident that Cheryl is pronounced as SHEH-ruhl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is CHEH-ruhl, at 36.7% 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 Cheryl? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Cheryl. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Cheryl, 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 SH EH1 R 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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