girls:
541 births since 1980
#5175 (9th percentile)
boys:
149.8k births since 1886
#226 (95th percentile)
overall:
150.4k births since 1886
#501 (94th percentile)
The name Cole is the #501 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 150,364 recorded births since 1886. This represents the 93.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 93.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #226 (95.1% percentile) for all time with 149,823 births since 1886. For girls, it ranks #5,175 (9.4% percentile) for all time with 541 births since 1980.
Cole first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1886 (1886 for boys and 1980 for girls). Birth data for Cole is available in 119 out of the 138 years between 1886 and 2023 (119 years for boys and 42 years for girls). 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 Cole has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Cole reached its peak popularity in 2003, achieving the 91.7% percentile (ranked #69) with 2,807 births per million. The name was most common in 2002, with 2,921 births per million (ranked 91.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2004, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Cole ranks #152 for boys (83.4% percentile) with 1,288 births per million, which is 44.1% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Cole reached its peak popularity in 2006, achieving the 2.8% percentile (ranked #939) with 15 births per million. The name was most common in 2006, with 15 births per million (ranked 2.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2019, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Cole ranks #938 for girls (1.0% percentile) with 8 births per million, which is 52.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Cole".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Cole.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Cole", 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 Cole.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Cole. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Cole is pronounced as kohl, 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 Cole? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Cole. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Cole, 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 OW1 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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