girls:
642 births since 1888
#5074 (11th percentile)
boys:
36.3k births since 1880
#592 (87th percentile)
overall:
36.9k births since 1880
#1300 (83rd percentile)
The name Cornelius is the #1,300 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 36,896 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 83.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #592 (87.1% percentile) for all time with 36,254 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,074 (11.2% percentile) for all time with 642 births since 1888.
Cornelius has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1888 for girls).
The name Cornelius has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Cornelius reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 55.8% percentile (ranked #235) with 432 births per million. The name was most common in 1882, with 877 births per million (ranked 45.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2015, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Cornelius ranks #833 for boys (8.6% percentile) with 45 births per million, which is 5.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Cornelius reached its peak popularity in 1923, achieving the 2.0% percentile (ranked #598) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1888, with 37 births per million (ranked 0.7% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1990.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Cornelius".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Cornelius.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Cornelius", 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 Cornelius.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Cornelius. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 81.3% confident that Cornelius is pronounced as kor-NEEL-yuhs, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is kor-NEE-lee-uhs, at 18.8% confidence, with 4 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 Cornelius? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Cornelius. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Cornelius, 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 AO0 R N IY1 L Y AH0 S) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker