girls:
18k births since 1886
#1104 (81st percentile)
boys:
1.4k births since 1883
#3248 (29th percentile)
overall:
19.4k births since 1883
#1847 (76th percentile)
The name Gay is the #1,847 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 19,367 recorded births since 1883. This represents the 76.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 76.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,104 (80.7% percentile) for all time with 17,985 births since 1886. For boys, it ranks #3,248 (29.1% percentile) for all time with 1,382 births since 1883.
Gay first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1883 (1883 for boys and 1886 for girls). Birth data for Gay is available in 96 out of the 100 years between 1883 and 1982 (95 years for girls and 77 years for boys). 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 Gay has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 92.9% of all recorded births being female. Interestingly, until around 1887, the name was more popular for boys (68.8% boys from 1883 to 1886), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (92.9% girls from 1887 to 1982).
For girls, Gay reached its peak popularity in 1952, achieving the 55.0% percentile (ranked #311) with 338 births per million. The name was most common in 1943, with 339 births per million (ranked 52.6% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1982.
For boys, Gay reached its peak popularity in 1941, achieving the 7.0% percentile (ranked #489) with 33 births per million. The name was most common in 1890, with 67 births per million (ranked 1.4% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1974.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Gay".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Gay.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Gay", 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 Gay.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Gay. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Gay is pronounced as gay, which has 1 syllables.
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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) 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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