girls:
220 births since 1969
#5496 (4th percentile)
boys:
60.5k births since 1900
#435 (91st percentile)
overall:
60.7k births since 1900
#953 (88th percentile)
The name Donovan is the #953 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 60,679 recorded births since 1900. This represents the 87.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 87.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #435 (90.5% percentile) for all time with 60,459 births since 1900. For girls, it ranks #5,496 (3.8% percentile) for all time with 220 births since 1969.
Donovan first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1900 (1900 for boys and 1969 for girls). Birth data for Donovan is available in 123 out of the 124 years between 1900 and 2023 (123 years for boys and 30 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 Donovan has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Donovan reached its peak popularity in 2005, achieving the 79.1% percentile (ranked #183) with 1,028 births per million. The name was most common in 2003, with 1,052 births per million (ranked 78.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2006, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Donovan ranks #421 for boys (53.8% percentile) with 354 births per million, which is 33.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Donovan reached its peak popularity in 2004, achieving the 0.9% percentile (ranked #929) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 2004, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2018.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Donovan".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Donovan.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Donovan", 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 Donovan.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Donovan. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.0% confident that Donovan is pronounced as DAH-nuh-vuhn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DOH-nuh-vuhn, at 10.0% confidence, with 3 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 Donovan? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Donovan. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Donovan, 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 AA1 N AH0 V AH0 N) 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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