girls:
268 births since 1891
#5448 (5th percentile)
boys:
39.2k births since 1880
#570 (88th percentile)
overall:
39.5k births since 1880
#1248 (84th percentile)
The name Clay is the #1,248 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 39,456 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 83.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #570 (87.6% percentile) for all time with 39,188 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,448 (4.7% percentile) for all time with 268 births since 1891.
Clay has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1891 for girls).
The name Clay has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Clay reached its peak popularity in 1961, achieving the 62.0% percentile (ranked #254) with 417 births per million. The name was most common in 1960, with 417 births per million (ranked 60.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2010, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Clay ranks #499 for boys (45.3% percentile) with 268 births per million, which is 64.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Clay reached its peak popularity in 1942, achieving the 1.5% percentile (ranked #612) with 10 births per million. The name was most common in 1891, with 31 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2020.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Clay".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Clay.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Clay", 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 Clay.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Clay. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Clay is pronounced as klay, 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 Clay? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Clay. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Clay, 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 EY1) 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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