girls:
2.4k births since 1910
#3544 (38th percentile)
boys:
448.6k births since 1880
#71 (98th percentile)
overall:
451k births since 1880
#151 (98th percentile)
The name Gerald is the #151 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 450,991 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #71 (98.5% percentile) for all time with 448,607 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,544 (38.0% percentile) for all time with 2,384 births since 1910.
Gerald has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1910 for girls).
The name Gerald has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Gerald reached its peak popularity in 1938, achieving the 96.6% percentile (ranked #19) with 8,773 births per million. The name was most common in 1939, with 8,874 births per million (ranked 96.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1941, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Gerald ranks #704 for boys (22.7% percentile) with 116 births per million, which is 1.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Gerald reached its peak popularity in 1931, achieving the 8.6% percentile (ranked #534) with 50 births per million. The name was most common in 1931, with 50 births per million (ranked 8.6% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1993.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Gerald".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Gerald.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Gerald", 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 Gerald.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Gerald. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 91.9% confident that Gerald is pronounced as JEH-ruhld, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is jer-UHLD, at 8.1% 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 Gerald? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Gerald. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Gerald, 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 JH EH1 R AH0 L D) 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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