Donald

girls:

5.6k births since 1890

#2233 (61st percentile)

boys:

1.4M births since 1880

#16 (100th percentile)

overall:

1.4M births since 1880

#22 (100th percentile)

Popularity Trends

The name Donald is the #22 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,419,543 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #16 (99.7% percentile) for all time with 1,413,982 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #2,233 (60.9% percentile) for all time with 5,561 births since 1890.

Donald has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1890 for girls).

The name Donald has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.

For boys, Donald reached its peak popularity in 1934, achieving the 99.1% percentile (ranked #6) with 28,635 births per million. The name was most common in 1934, with 28,635 births per million (ranked 99.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1935, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Donald ranks #543 for boys (40.4% percentile) with 226 births per million, which is 0.8% of its peak share of births.

For girls, Donald reached its peak popularity in 1930, achieving the 27.5% percentile (ranked #430) with 150 births per million. The name was most common in 1930, with 150 births per million (ranked 27.5% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2004.

This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Donald".

1880 2023 18802023

Key Statistics

Total Births
5,561
Peak Births
175
Peak Year
1930
First Recorded
1890
Peak Percentile
27.5%
Current Percentile
Peak Rank
#430
Current Rank
Female statistics
Total Births
1,413,982
Peak Births
30,408
Peak Year
1934
First Recorded
1880
Peak Percentile
99.1%
Current Percentile
40.4%
Peak Rank
#6
Current Rank
#543
Male statistics

How to Pronounce Donald

Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Donald. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.

Our model is 81.6% confident that Donald is pronounced as DAH-nuhld, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DOH-nuhld, at 10.5% confidence, with 2 syllables.

DAH-nuhld (2 syllables)
Verified
81.6% confidence
D AA1 N AH0 L D
DOH-nuhld (2 syllables)
10.5% confidence
D OW1 N AH0 L D
DUH-nuhld (2 syllables)
7.9% confidence
D AH1 N AH0 L D

Possible Additional Pronunciations

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 Donald? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Donald. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Donald, please vote using the thumbs up button.

About Pronunciation Data

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 AA1 N AH0 L D) 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