girls:
14.2k births since 1880
#1291 (77th percentile)
boys:
537 births since 1893
#4049 (12th percentile)
overall:
14.8k births since 1880
#2160 (72nd percentile)
The name Hester is the #2,160 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 14,758 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 72.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 72.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,291 (77.4% percentile) for all time with 14,221 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,049 (11.7% percentile) for all time with 537 births since 1893.
Hester has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1893 for boys). Birth data for Hester is available in 122 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (122 years for girls and 51 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 Hester has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 96.4% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Hester reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 48.7% percentile (ranked #303) with 328 births per million. The name was most common in 1893, with 688 births per million (ranked 41.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Hester ranks #947 for girls (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 0.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Hester reached its peak popularity in 1916, achieving the 3.8% percentile (ranked #483) with 26 births per million. The name was most common in 1900, with 56 births per million (ranked 1.6% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1970.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Hester".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Hester.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Hester", 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 Hester.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Hester. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 95.2% confident that Hester is pronounced as HEH-ster, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is HEH-stuh, at 4.8% 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 Hester? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Hester. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Hester, 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 S 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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