girls:
53.7k births since 1882
#549 (90th percentile)
boys:
38 births since 1957
#4548 (1st percentile)
overall:
53.8k births since 1882
#1029 (87th percentile)
The name Gretchen is the #1,029 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 53,761 recorded births since 1882. This represents the 86.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 86.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #549 (90.4% percentile) for all time with 53,723 births since 1882. For boys, it ranks #4,548 (0.8% percentile) for all time with 38 births since 1957.
Gretchen first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1882 (1882 for girls and 1957 for boys).
The name Gretchen has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.9% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Gretchen reached its peak popularity in 1976, achieving the 74.7% percentile (ranked #193) with 778 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 869 births per million (ranked 74.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2007, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Gretchen ranks #888 for girls (6.2% percentile) with 37 births per million, which is 4.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Gretchen reached its peak popularity in 1975, achieving the 0.6% percentile (ranked #656) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1975, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.6% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1980.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Gretchen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Gretchen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Gretchen", 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 Gretchen.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Gretchen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 79.5% confident that Gretchen is pronounced as GREH-chuhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is GREHT-chuhn, at 20.5% 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 Gretchen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Gretchen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Gretchen, 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 R EH1 CH 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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