girls:
1.2k births since 1998
#4493 (21st percentile)
boys:
47.7k births since 1885
#518 (89th percentile)
overall:
48.9k births since 1885
#1092 (86th percentile)
The name Dawson is the #1,092 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 48,926 recorded births since 1885. This represents the 85.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 85.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #518 (88.7% percentile) for all time with 47,700 births since 1885. For girls, it ranks #4,493 (21.4% percentile) for all time with 1,226 births since 1998.
Dawson first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1885 (1885 for boys and 1998 for girls). Birth data for Dawson is available in 127 out of the 139 years between 1885 and 2023 (127 years for boys and 26 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 Dawson has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 97.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Dawson reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 84.1% percentile (ranked #146) with 1,332 births per million. The name was most common in 1999, with 1,374 births per million (ranked 83.2% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Dawson is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #146 (84.1% percentile) with 1,332 births per million.
For girls, Dawson reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 10.1% percentile (ranked #842) with 55 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 57 births per million (ranked 10.0% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2008, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Dawson is at or near its peak popularity for girls, ranked #852 (10.0% percentile) with 57 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Dawson".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Dawson.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Dawson", 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 Dawson.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Dawson. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Dawson is pronounced as DAW-suhn, which has 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 Dawson? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Dawson. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Dawson, 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 AO1 S AH0 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker