girls:
477 births since 1920
#5239 (8th percentile)
boys:
4.2k births since 1880
#1893 (59th percentile)
overall:
4.6k births since 1880
#4008 (48th percentile)
The name Dempsey is the #4,008 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,640 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 48.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 48.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,893 (58.7% percentile) for all time with 4,163 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,239 (8.3% percentile) for all time with 477 births since 1920.
Dempsey has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1920 for girls). Birth data for Dempsey is available in 136 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (136 years for boys and 27 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 Dempsey has been given predominantly to boys, with 89.7% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 63.4% of babies named Dempsey were boys.
For boys, Dempsey reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 19.1% percentile (ranked #433) with 105 births per million. The name was most common in 1919, with 105 births per million (ranked 19.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2017, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Dempsey ranks #857 for boys (5.9% percentile) with 32 births per million, which is 30.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Dempsey reached its peak popularity in 2013, achieving the 3.4% percentile (ranked #899) with 19 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 19 births per million (ranked 3.1% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Dempsey is at or near its peak popularity for girls, ranked #918 (3.1% percentile) with 19 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Dempsey".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Dempsey.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Dempsey", 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 Dempsey.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Dempsey. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 81.0% confident that Dempsey is pronounced as DEHMP-see, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DEHM-see, at 19.0% 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 Dempsey? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Dempsey. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Dempsey, 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 M P S IY0) 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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