girls:
162.6k births since 1901
#241 (96th percentile)
boys:
330 births since 1927
#4256 (7th percentile)
overall:
163k births since 1901
#459 (94th percentile)
The name Colleen is the #459 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 162,959 recorded births since 1901. This represents the 94.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #241 (95.8% percentile) for all time with 162,629 births since 1901. For boys, it ranks #4,256 (7.1% percentile) for all time with 330 births since 1927.
Colleen first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1901 (1901 for girls and 1927 for boys). Birth data for Colleen is available in 122 out of the 123 years between 1901 and 2023 (122 years for girls and 38 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 Colleen has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Colleen reached its peak popularity in 1964, achieving the 88.1% percentile (ranked #94) with 2,321 births per million. The name was most common in 1964, with 2,321 births per million (ranked 88.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1965, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Colleen ranks #869 for girls (8.2% percentile) with 47 births per million, which is 2.0% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Colleen reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 1.5% percentile (ranked #746) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1985, with 8 births per million (ranked 1.4% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2005.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Colleen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Colleen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Colleen", 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 Colleen.
Our model has identified 8 different pronunciations for the name Colleen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 29.4% confident that Colleen is pronounced as kah-LEEN, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is kuh-LEEN, at 17.6% 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 Colleen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Colleen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Colleen, 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 AA0 L IY1 N) 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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