girls:
909 births since 1956
#4807 (16th percentile)
boys:
236.5k births since 1924
#164 (96th percentile)
overall:
237.4k births since 1924
#339 (96th percentile)
The name Derek is the #339 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 237,405 recorded births since 1924. This represents the 95.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #164 (96.4% percentile) for all time with 236,496 births since 1924. For girls, it ranks #4,807 (15.9% percentile) for all time with 909 births since 1956.
Derek first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1924 (1924 for boys and 1956 for girls). Birth data for Derek is available in 96 out of the 100 years between 1924 and 2023 (96 years for boys and 46 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 Derek has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Derek reached its peak popularity in 1990, achieving the 93.1% percentile (ranked #54) with 3,757 births per million. The name was most common in 1987, with 4,232 births per million (ranked 92.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1990, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Derek ranks #263 for boys (71.2% percentile) with 676 births per million, which is 16.0% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Derek reached its peak popularity in 1987, achieving the 6.5% percentile (ranked #750) with 30 births per million. The name was most common in 1980, with 31 births per million (ranked 6.4% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2011.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Derek".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Derek.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Derek", 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 Derek.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Derek. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 86.7% confident that Derek is pronounced as DEH-rihk, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DEH-ruhk, at 13.3% 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 Derek? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Derek. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Derek, 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 R IH0 K) 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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