girls:
4.3k births since 1880
#2633 (54th percentile)
boys:
12k births since 1880
#1049 (77th percentile)
overall:
16.3k births since 1880
#2028 (74th percentile)
The name Clair is the #2,028 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 16,291 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 73.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 73.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,049 (77.1% percentile) for all time with 12,040 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #2,633 (53.9% percentile) for all time with 4,251 births since 1880.
Clair has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Clair has been given predominantly to boys, with 73.9% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 0.0% of babies named Clair were boys. Interestingly, until around 1977, the name was more popular for boys (84.6% boys from 1880 to 1976), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (90.4% girls from 1977 to 2023).
For boys, Clair reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 50.2% percentile (ranked #267) with 334 births per million. The name was most common in 1913, with 356 births per million (ranked 39.3% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2020.
For girls, Clair reached its peak popularity in 1930, achieving the 7.8% percentile (ranked #547) with 44 births per million. The name was most common in 1899, with 61 births per million (ranked 3.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2015, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Clair ranks #924 for girls (2.4% percentile) with 16 births per million, which is 26.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Clair".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Claire. View all variations of Claire.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Clair", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 7 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Claire" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Claire..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Clair. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Clair is pronounced as klair, which has 1 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 Clair? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Clair. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Clair, 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 K L EH1 R) 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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