girls:
278.9k births since 1880
#140 (98th percentile)
boys:
1.5k births since 1880
#3162 (31st percentile)
overall:
280.4k births since 1880
#282 (96th percentile)
The name Ethel is the #282 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 280,353 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #140 (97.6% percentile) for all time with 278,863 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,162 (31.0% percentile) for all time with 1,490 births since 1880.
Ethel has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Ethel has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.5% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Ethel reached its peak popularity in 1896, achieving the 98.5% percentile (ranked #6) with 13,897 births per million. The name was most common in 1894, with 13,930 births per million (ranked 98.1% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2010, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Ethel ranks #929 for girls (1.9% percentile) with 13 births per million, which is 0.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Ethel reached its peak popularity in 1910, achieving the 10.0% percentile (ranked #252) with 158 births per million. The name was most common in 1898, with 182 births per million (ranked 8.3% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1968.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ethel".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ethel.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ethel", 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 Ethel.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Ethel. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Ethel is pronounced as EH-thuhl, 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 Ethel? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ethel. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ethel, 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 TH AH0 L) 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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