girls:
1.3k births since 1926
#4460 (22nd percentile)
boys:
357.9k births since 1880
#94 (98th percentile)
overall:
359.2k births since 1880
#200 (97th percentile)
The name Elijah is the #200 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 359,194 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 97.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 97.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #94 (98.0% percentile) for all time with 357,932 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,460 (21.9% percentile) for all time with 1,262 births since 1926.
Elijah has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1926 for girls).
The name Elijah has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Elijah reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 99.7% percentile (ranked #4) with 6,835 births per million. The name was most common in 2020, with 7,136 births per million (ranked 99.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Elijah ranks #5 for boys (99.6% percentile) with 6,254 births per million, which is 87.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Elijah reached its peak popularity in 2004, achieving the 7.7% percentile (ranked #865) with 38 births per million. The name was most common in 2004, with 38 births per million (ranked 7.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Elijah ranks #932 for girls (1.6% percentile) with 11 births per million, which is 30.0% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Elijah".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Elijah.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Elijah", 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 Elijah.
Our model has identified 6 different pronunciations for the name Elijah. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 40.7% confident that Elijah is pronounced as ee-LAI-juh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ih-LAI-juh, at 25.9% 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 Elijah? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Elijah. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Elijah, 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 IY0 L AY1 JH AH0) 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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