girls:
39.2k births since 1915
#685 (88th percentile)
boys:
90.9k births since 1966
#329 (93rd percentile)
overall:
130.2k births since 1915
#575 (93rd percentile)
The name Dakota is the #575 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 130,179 recorded births since 1915. This represents the 92.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 92.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #329 (92.8% percentile) for all time with 90,938 births since 1966. For girls, it ranks #685 (88.0% percentile) for all time with 39,241 births since 1915.
Dakota first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1915 (1915 for girls and 1966 for boys). Birth data for Dakota is available in 66 out of the 109 years between 1915 and 2023 (64 years for girls and 55 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 Dakota has been given to both genders, with a slight preference for boys (69.9% of all recorded births). In 2023, 46.0% of babies named Dakota were boys.
For boys, Dakota reached its peak popularity in 1995, achieving the 93.1% percentile (ranked #56) with 3,269 births per million. The name was most common in 1995, with 3,269 births per million (ranked 93.1% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2016, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Dakota ranks #312 for boys (65.8% percentile) with 551 births per million, which is 16.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Dakota reached its peak popularity in 2006, achieving the 80.6% percentile (ranked #188) with 880 births per million. The name was most common in 2006, with 880 births per million (ranked 80.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2019, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Dakota ranks #250 for girls (73.7% percentile) with 676 births per million, which is 76.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Dakota".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Dakota.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Dakota", 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 Dakota.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Dakota. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Dakota is pronounced as duh-KOH-tuh, which has 3 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 Dakota? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Dakota. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Dakota, 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 D AH0 K OW1 T AH0) 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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