girls:
1M births since 1880
#12 (100th percentile)
boys:
3.1k births since 1881
#2244 (51st percentile)
overall:
1M births since 1880
#40 (99th percentile)
The name Helen is the #40 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,025,891 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #12 (99.8% percentile) for all time with 1,022,786 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #2,244 (51.0% percentile) for all time with 3,105 births since 1881.
Helen has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1881 for boys).
The name Helen has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Helen reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 99.8% percentile (ranked #2) with 28,695 births per million. The name was most common in 1917, with 30,481 births per million (ranked 99.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Helen ranks #370 for girls (61.0% percentile) with 439 births per million, which is 1.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Helen reached its peak popularity in 1927, achieving the 16.2% percentile (ranked #452) with 79 births per million. The name was most common in 1902, with 226 births per million (ranked 10.7% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2004.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Helen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Helen.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Helen", 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 Helen.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Helen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Helen is pronounced as HEH-luhn, which has 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 Helen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Helen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Helen, 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 L 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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