girls:
1.9k births since 1886
#3936 (31st percentile)
boys:
302.1k births since 1880
#118 (97th percentile)
overall:
303.9k births since 1880
#251 (97th percentile)
The name Ernest is the #251 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 303,926 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #118 (97.4% percentile) for all time with 302,072 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,936 (31.1% percentile) for all time with 1,854 births since 1886.
Ernest has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1886 for girls).
The name Ernest has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.4% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Ernest reached its peak popularity in 1924, achieving the 93.5% percentile (ranked #37) with 4,861 births per million. The name was most common in 1895, with 6,585 births per million (ranked 90.1% percentile). Despite a low point around 2019, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Ernest ranks #707 for boys (22.4% percentile) with 114 births per million, which is 1.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ernest reached its peak popularity in 1927, achieving the 7.6% percentile (ranked #557) with 41 births per million. The name was most common in 1892, with 62 births per million (ranked 3.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1991.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ernest".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ernest.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ernest", 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 Ernest.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Ernest. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 75.6% confident that Ernest is pronounced as ER-nuhst, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ER-nihst, at 17.8% 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 Ernest? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ernest. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ernest, 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.
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