girls:
4k births since 1910
#2729 (52nd percentile)
boys:
126 births since 1910
#4460 (3rd percentile)
overall:
4.1k births since 1910
#4258 (45th percentile)
The name Halley is the #4,258 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,132 recorded births since 1910. This represents the 45.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 45.0% of all names). For girls, it ranks #2,729 (52.2% percentile) for all time with 4,006 births since 1910. For boys, it ranks #4,460 (2.7% percentile) for all time with 126 births since 1910.
Halley first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1910 . Birth data for Halley is available in 79 out of the 114 years between 1910 and 2023 (65 years for girls and 17 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 Halley has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 97.0% of all recorded births being female. Interestingly, until around 1957, the name was more popular for boys (77.0% boys from 1910 to 1956), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (99.2% girls from 1957 to 2023).
For girls, Halley reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 37.8% percentile (ranked #507) with 180 births per million. The name was most common in 1986, with 180 births per million (ranked 37.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2018, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Halley ranks #903 for girls (4.7% percentile) with 28 births per million, which is 15.5% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Halley reached its peak popularity in 1910, achieving the 2.5% percentile (ranked #273) with 58 births per million. The name was most common in 1910, with 58 births per million (ranked 2.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1986.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Halley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Hallie. View all variations of Hallie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Halley", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 11 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Hallie" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Hallie..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Halley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 81.6% confident that Halley is pronounced as HA-lee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is HAY-lee, at 18.4% 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 Halley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Halley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Halley, 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 IY0) 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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