girls:
550.6k births since 1914
#55 (99th percentile)
boys:
1.1k births since 1949
#3457 (25th percentile)
overall:
551.8k births since 1914
#117 (99th percentile)
The name Debra is the #117 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 551,759 recorded births since 1914. This represents the 98.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #55 (99.1% percentile) for all time with 550,613 births since 1914. For boys, it ranks #3,457 (24.6% percentile) for all time with 1,146 births since 1949.
Debra first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1914 (1914 for girls and 1949 for boys). Birth data for Debra is available in 109 out of the 110 years between 1914 and 2023 (109 years for girls and 34 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 Debra has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Debra reached its peak popularity in 1956, achieving the 99.9% percentile (ranked #2) with 23,464 births per million. The name was most common in 1955, with 25,217 births per million (ranked 99.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Debra ranks #922 for girls (2.6% percentile) with 17 births per million, which is 0.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Debra reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 13.3% percentile (ranked #534) with 42 births per million. The name was most common in 1954, with 42 births per million (ranked 13.3% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1984.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Debra".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Deborah. View all variations of Deborah.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Debra", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 32 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Deborah" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Deborah..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Debra. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Debra is pronounced as DEH-bruh, 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 Debra? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Debra. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Debra, 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 EH1 B R 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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