girls:
38.8k births since 1880
#691 (88th percentile)
overall:
38.8k births since 1880
#1264 (84th percentile)
The name Helena is the #1,264 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 38,801 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 83.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #691 (87.9% percentile) for all time with 38,801 births since 1880.
Helena has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
For girls, Helena reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 56.6% percentile (ranked #412) with 386 births per million. The name was most common in 1884, with 625 births per million (ranked 32.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2012, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Helena ranks #412 for girls (56.6% percentile) with 386 births per million, which is 61.7% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Helena".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Helena.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Helena", 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 Helena.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Helena. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 63.8% confident that Helena is pronounced as HEH-luh-nuh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is huh-LEE-nuh, at 23.4% confidence, with 3 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 Helena? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Helena. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Helena, 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 AH0) 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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