girls:
2.4k births since 1917
#3542 (38th percentile)
boys:
28.5k births since 1912
#683 (85th percentile)
overall:
30.9k births since 1912
#1444 (81st percentile)
The name Darnell is the #1,444 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 30,902 recorded births since 1912. This represents the 81.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 81.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #683 (85.1% percentile) for all time with 28,515 births since 1912. For girls, it ranks #3,542 (38.0% percentile) for all time with 2,387 births since 1917.
Darnell first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1912 (1912 for boys and 1917 for girls). Birth data for Darnell is available in 111 out of the 112 years between 1912 and 2023 (111 years for boys and 79 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 Darnell has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 92.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Darnell reached its peak popularity in 1984, achieving the 61.1% percentile (ranked #268) with 395 births per million. The name was most common in 1984, with 395 births per million (ranked 61.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2009, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Darnell ranks #831 for boys (8.8% percentile) with 46 births per million, which is 11.8% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Darnell reached its peak popularity in 1950, achieving the 9.7% percentile (ranked #606) with 40 births per million. The name was most common in 1950, with 40 births per million (ranked 9.7% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2017.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Darnell".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Darnell.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Darnell", 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 Darnell.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Darnell. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 77.5% confident that Darnell is pronounced as dahr-NEHL, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DAHR-nehl, at 22.5% 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 Darnell? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Darnell. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Darnell, 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 AA0 R N EH1 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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