girls:
29.6k births since 1880
#825 (86th percentile)
boys:
289k births since 1880
#126 (97th percentile)
overall:
318.6k births since 1880
#237 (97th percentile)
The name Francis is the #237 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 318,630 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #126 (97.3% percentile) for all time with 289,012 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #825 (85.6% percentile) for all time with 29,618 births since 1880.
Francis has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Francis has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 90.7% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 87.4% of babies named Francis were boys.
For boys, Francis reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 94.5% percentile (ranked #30) with 6,053 births per million. The name was most common in 1915, with 6,350 births per million (ranked 94.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Francis ranks #415 for boys (54.5% percentile) with 366 births per million, which is 5.8% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Francis reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 59.9% percentile (ranked #239) with 573 births per million. The name was most common in 1919, with 573 births per million (ranked 59.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2013, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Francis ranks #855 for girls (9.7% percentile) with 55 births per million, which is 9.7% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Francis".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Frances. View all variations of Frances.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Francis", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 8 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Frances" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Frances..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Francis. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 72.0% confident that Francis is pronounced as FRAN-sihs, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is FRAN-suhs, at 28.0% 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 Francis? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Francis. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Francis, 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 F R AE1 N S IH0 S) 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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