girls:
2.7k births since 1914
#3346 (41st percentile)
boys:
620.2k births since 1880
#51 (99th percentile)
overall:
622.9k births since 1880
#94 (99th percentile)
The name Dennis is the #94 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 622,907 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #51 (98.9% percentile) for all time with 620,221 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,346 (41.4% percentile) for all time with 2,686 births since 1914.
Dennis has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1914 for girls).
The name Dennis has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Dennis reached its peak popularity in 1949, achieving the 97.4% percentile (ranked #16) with 12,068 births per million. The name was most common in 1946, with 12,994 births per million (ranked 97.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1950, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Dennis ranks #536 for boys (41.2% percentile) with 233 births per million, which is 1.8% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Dennis reached its peak popularity in 1943, achieving the 10.1% percentile (ranked #564) with 47 births per million. The name was most common in 1943, with 47 births per million (ranked 10.1% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Dennis".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Dennis.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Dennis", 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 Dennis.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Dennis. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 82.9% confident that Dennis is pronounced as DEH-nihs, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DEH-nuhs, at 17.1% 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 Dennis? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Dennis. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Dennis, 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 N IH0 S) 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