girls:
481 births since 1935
#5235 (8th percentile)
boys:
107.1k births since 1880
#290 (94th percentile)
overall:
107.5k births since 1880
#642 (92nd percentile)
The name Hector is the #642 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 107,545 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 91.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #290 (93.7% percentile) for all time with 107,064 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,235 (8.4% percentile) for all time with 481 births since 1935.
Hector has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1935 for girls). Birth data for Hector is available in 143 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (143 years for boys and 44 years for girls). 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 Hector has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Hector reached its peak popularity in 2005, achieving the 81.2% percentile (ranked #165) with 1,155 births per million. The name was most common in 2005, with 1,155 births per million (ranked 81.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2008, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Hector ranks #360 for boys (60.5% percentile) with 452 births per million, which is 39.1% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Hector reached its peak popularity in 1980, achieving the 2.0% percentile (ranked #769) with 12 births per million. The name was most common in 1980, with 12 births per million (ranked 2.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2008.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Hector".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Hector.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Hector", 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 Hector.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Hector. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.7% confident that Hector is pronounced as HEHK-ter, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is HEHK-tor, at 9.3% 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 Hector? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Hector. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Hector, 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 K T 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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