girls:
1.1M births since 1880
#9 (100th percentile)
boys:
3.7k births since 1894
#2045 (55th percentile)
overall:
1.1M births since 1880
#34 (100th percentile)
The name Dorothy is the #34 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,114,423 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.6% of all names). For girls, it ranks #9 (99.9% percentile) for all time with 1,110,746 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #2,045 (55.4% percentile) for all time with 3,677 births since 1894.
Dorothy has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1894 for boys).
The name Dorothy has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Dorothy reached its peak popularity in 1925, achieving the 99.8% percentile (ranked #2) with 30,536 births per million. The name was most common in 1923, with 31,173 births per million (ranked 99.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2009, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Dorothy ranks #419 for girls (55.8% percentile) with 376 births per million, which is 1.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Dorothy reached its peak popularity in 1930, achieving the 26.3% percentile (ranked #387) with 135 births per million. The name was most common in 1909, with 147 births per million (ranked 7.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1989.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Dorothy".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Dorothy.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Dorothy", 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 Dorothy.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Dorothy. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 77.3% confident that Dorothy is pronounced as DAW-ruh-thee, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is DOR-thee, at 15.9% 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 Dorothy? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Dorothy. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Dorothy, 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 AO1 R AH0 TH IY0) 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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