girls:
560 births since 1938
#5156 (10th percentile)
boys:
16.4k births since 1889
#902 (80th percentile)
overall:
17k births since 1889
#1980 (74th percentile)
The name Galen is the #1,980 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 16,989 recorded births since 1889. This represents the 74.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 74.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #902 (80.3% percentile) for all time with 16,429 births since 1889. For girls, it ranks #5,156 (9.8% percentile) for all time with 560 births since 1938.
Galen first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1889 (1889 for boys and 1938 for girls). Birth data for Galen is available in 126 out of the 135 years between 1889 and 2023 (126 years for boys and 58 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 Galen has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 96.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Galen reached its peak popularity in 1949, achieving the 47.5% percentile (ranked #308) with 240 births per million. The name was most common in 1949, with 240 births per million (ranked 47.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Galen ranks #878 for boys (3.6% percentile) with 21 births per million, which is 8.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Galen reached its peak popularity in 1993, achieving the 2.3% percentile (ranked #845) with 13 births per million. The name was most common in 1993, with 13 births per million (ranked 2.3% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2005.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Galen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Galen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Galen", 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 Galen.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Galen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Galen is pronounced as GAY-luhn, 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 Galen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Galen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Galen, 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 G EY1 L 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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