girls:
1k births since 1927
#4690 (18th percentile)
boys:
14.2k births since 1912
#979 (79th percentile)
overall:
15.3k births since 1912
#2120 (73rd percentile)
The name Donnell is the #2,120 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 15,257 recorded births since 1912. This represents the 72.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 72.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #979 (78.7% percentile) for all time with 14,231 births since 1912. For girls, it ranks #4,690 (17.9% percentile) for all time with 1,026 births since 1927.
Donnell first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1912 (1912 for boys and 1927 for girls).
The name Donnell has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 93.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Donnell reached its peak popularity in 1982, achieving the 36.2% percentile (ranked #441) with 154 births per million. The name was most common in 1975, with 166 births per million (ranked 35.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2008, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Donnell ranks #893 for boys (2.0% percentile) with 13 births per million, which is 7.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Donnell reached its peak popularity in 1969, achieving the 5.8% percentile (ranked #719) with 28 births per million. The name was most common in 1969, with 28 births per million (ranked 5.8% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2006.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Donnell".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Donnell.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Donnell", 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 Donnell.
Our model has identified 7 different pronunciations for the name Donnell. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 35.3% confident that Donnell is pronounced as duh-NEHL, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DAH-nuhl, at 25.5% 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 Donnell? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Donnell. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Donnell, 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 AH0 N EH1 L) 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