girls:
726 births since 1898
#4990 (13th percentile)
boys:
58.3k births since 1880
#444 (90th percentile)
overall:
59.1k births since 1880
#971 (87th percentile)
The name Earnest is the #971 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 59,074 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 87.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 87.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #444 (90.3% percentile) for all time with 58,348 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,990 (12.7% percentile) for all time with 726 births since 1898.
Earnest has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1898 for girls).
The name Earnest has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Earnest reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 75.1% percentile (ranked #134) with 1,048 births per million. The name was most common in 1909, with 1,442 births per million (ranked 62.9% percentile). Despite a low point around 2017, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Earnest ranks #892 for boys (2.1% percentile) with 13 births per million, which is 0.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Earnest reached its peak popularity in 1922, achieving the 2.5% percentile (ranked #582) with 16 births per million. The name was most common in 1898, with 18 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1980.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Earnest".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Ernest. View all variations of Ernest.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Earnest", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 4 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Ernest" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Ernest..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Earnest. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 75.6% confident that Earnest is pronounced as ER-nuhst, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ER-nihst, at 24.4% 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 Earnest? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Earnest. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Earnest, 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 ER1 N AH0 S T) 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