girls:
274.8k births since 1880
#142 (98th percentile)
boys:
745 births since 1884
#3842 (16th percentile)
overall:
275.5k births since 1880
#286 (96th percentile)
The name Ellen is the #286 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 275,541 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.3% of all names). For girls, it ranks #142 (97.5% percentile) for all time with 274,796 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,842 (16.2% percentile) for all time with 745 births since 1884.
Ellen has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1884 for boys).
The name Ellen has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Ellen reached its peak popularity in 1946, achieving the 91.3% percentile (ranked #58) with 3,247 births per million. The name was most common in 1884, with 4,339 births per million (ranked 75.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2017, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Ellen ranks #717 for girls (24.3% percentile) with 135 births per million, which is 3.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Ellen reached its peak popularity in 1941, achieving the 3.2% percentile (ranked #509) with 18 births per million. The name was most common in 1885, with 60 births per million (ranked 1.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1993.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ellen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ellen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ellen", 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 Ellen.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Ellen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Ellen is pronounced as EH-luhn, which has 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 Ellen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ellen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ellen, 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 EH1 L 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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