girls:
12 births since 1924
#5704 (0th percentile)
boys:
16.7k births since 1880
#891 (81st percentile)
overall:
16.7k births since 1880
#1996 (74th percentile)
The name Hal is the #1,996 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 16,725 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 74.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 74.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #891 (80.6% percentile) for all time with 16,713 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,704 (0.2% percentile) for all time with 12 births since 1924.
Hal has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1924 for girls).
The name Hal has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.9% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Hal reached its peak popularity in 1956, achieving the 53.9% percentile (ranked #295) with 279 births per million. The name was most common in 1956, with 279 births per million (ranked 53.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2017, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Hal ranks #875 for boys (4.0% percentile) with 22 births per million, which is 8.0% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Hal reached its peak popularity in 1926, achieving the 0.2% percentile (ranked #603) with 5 births per million. The name was most common in 1926, with 5 births per million (ranked 0.2% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1926.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Hal".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Hal.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Hal", 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 Hal.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Hal. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 87.2% confident that Hal is pronounced as hal, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is hahl, at 12.8% confidence, with 1 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 Hal? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Hal. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Hal, 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 HH AE1 L) 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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