girls:
525.6k births since 1914
#58 (99th percentile)
boys:
1.5k births since 1962
#3173 (31st percentile)
overall:
527k births since 1914
#123 (98th percentile)
The name Heather is the #123 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 527,042 recorded births since 1914. This represents the 98.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #58 (99.0% percentile) for all time with 525,565 births since 1914. For boys, it ranks #3,173 (30.8% percentile) for all time with 1,477 births since 1962.
Heather first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1914 (1914 for girls and 1962 for boys). Birth data for Heather is available in 100 out of the 110 years between 1914 and 2023 (100 years for girls and 38 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 Heather has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Heather reached its peak popularity in 1975, achieving the 99.7% percentile (ranked #3) with 15,570 births per million. The name was most common in 1975, with 15,570 births per million (ranked 99.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1987, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Heather ranks #782 for girls (17.4% percentile) with 97 births per million, which is 0.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Heather reached its peak popularity in 1976, achieving the 11.8% percentile (ranked #579) with 50 births per million. The name was most common in 1976, with 50 births per million (ranked 11.8% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2007.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Heather".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Heather.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Heather", 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 Heather.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Heather. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 75.6% confident that Heather is pronounced as HEH-ther, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is HEH-ther, at 14.6% 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 Heather? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Heather. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Heather, 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 EH1 DH ER0) 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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