girls:
126 births since 2014
#5590 (2nd percentile)
boys:
656 births since 1995
#3931 (14th percentile)
overall:
782 births since 1995
#6957 (10th percentile)
The name Espen is the #6,957 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 782 recorded births since 1995. This represents the 10.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 10.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #3,931 (14.2% percentile) for all time with 656 births since 1995. For girls, it ranks #5,590 (2.2% percentile) for all time with 126 births since 2014.
Espen first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1995 (1995 for boys and 2014 for girls).
The name Espen has been given predominantly to boys, with 83.9% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 64.5% of babies named Espen were boys.
For boys, Espen reached its peak popularity in 2005, achieving the 3.6% percentile (ranked #842) with 17 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 18 births per million (ranked 3.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Espen ranks #896 for boys (1.6% percentile) with 11 births per million, which is 60.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Espen reached its peak popularity in 2019, achieving the 1.4% percentile (ranked #932) with 10 births per million. The name was most common in 2022, with 10 births per million (ranked 1.4% percentile). Over the past 5 years, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Espen ranks #941 for girls (0.6% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 62.6% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Espen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Espen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Espen", 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 Espen.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Espen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 55.6% confident that Espen is pronounced as EH-spuhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is EH-spehn, at 44.4% 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 Espen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Espen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Espen, 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 S P 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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