girls:
16k births since 1922
#1189 (79th percentile)
boys:
68 births since 1978
#4518 (1st percentile)
overall:
16k births since 1922
#2049 (74th percentile)
The name Gillian is the #2,049 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 16,025 recorded births since 1922. This represents the 73.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 73.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,189 (79.2% percentile) for all time with 15,957 births since 1922. For boys, it ranks #4,518 (1.4% percentile) for all time with 68 births since 1978.
Gillian first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1922 (1922 for girls and 1978 for boys). Birth data for Gillian is available in 87 out of the 102 years between 1922 and 2023 (87 years for girls and 10 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 Gillian has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Gillian reached its peak popularity in 1999, achieving the 67.5% percentile (ranked #289) with 525 births per million. The name was most common in 1999, with 525 births per million (ranked 67.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2002, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Gillian ranks #901 for girls (4.9% percentile) with 29 births per million, which is 5.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Gillian reached its peak popularity in 1988, achieving the 0.7% percentile (ranked #721) with 5 births per million. The name was most common in 1988, with 5 births per million (ranked 0.7% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2016.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Gillian".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Jillian. View all variations of Jillian.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Gillian", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 15 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Jillian" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Jillian..
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Gillian. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 62.0% confident that Gillian is pronounced as JIH-lee-uhn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is GIH-lee-uhn, at 16.0% confidence, with 3 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 Gillian? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Gillian. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Gillian, 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 IH1 L IY0 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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