girls:
571 births since 1918
#5145 (10th percentile)
boys:
4.4k births since 1880
#1832 (60th percentile)
overall:
5k births since 1880
#3879 (50th percentile)
The name Ely is the #3,879 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,953 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 49.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 49.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,832 (60.0% percentile) for all time with 4,382 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,145 (10.0% percentile) for all time with 571 births since 1918.
Ely has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1918 for girls). Birth data for Ely is available in 129 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (129 years for boys and 38 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 Ely has been given predominantly to boys, with 88.5% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 62.2% of babies named Ely were boys.
For boys, Ely reached its peak popularity in 2009, achieving the 17.1% percentile (ranked #747) with 75 births per million. The name was most common in 1882, with 98 births per million (ranked 3.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2011, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Ely ranks #870 for boys (4.5% percentile) with 25 births per million, which is 25.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ely reached its peak popularity in 2022, achieving the 2.6% percentile (ranked #933) with 17 births per million. The name was most common in 2022, with 17 births per million (ranked 2.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Ely is at or near its peak popularity for girls, ranked #924 (2.4% percentile) with 16 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ely".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Eli. View all variations of Eli.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ely", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 32 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Eli" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Eli..
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Ely. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 36.7% confident that Ely is pronounced as EE-lai, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is EE-lee, at 36.7% 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 Ely? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ely. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ely, 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 IY1 L AY0) 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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