girls:
411 births since 1987
#5305 (7th percentile)
boys:
17.3k births since 1880
#869 (81st percentile)
overall:
17.7k births since 1880
#1935 (75th percentile)
The name Houston is the #1,935 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 17,729 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 75.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 75.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #869 (81.1% percentile) for all time with 17,318 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,305 (7.2% percentile) for all time with 411 births since 1987.
Houston has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1987 for girls).
The name Houston has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 97.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Houston reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 42.0% percentile (ranked #540) with 234 births per million. The name was most common in 1901, with 268 births per million (ranked 11.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2013, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Houston ranks #559 for boys (38.7% percentile) with 211 births per million, which is 78.8% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Houston reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 2.6% percentile (ranked #912) with 16 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 16 births per million (ranked 2.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Houston ranks #937 for girls (1.1% percentile) with 9 births per million, which is 53.0% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Houston".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Houston.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Houston", 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 Houston.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Houston. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 71.1% confident that Houston is pronounced as HYUE-stuhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is HUE-stuhn, at 20.0% 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 Houston? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Houston. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Houston, 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 Y UW1 S T 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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