girls:
799 births since 1940
#4917 (14th percentile)
boys:
249.1k births since 1912
#148 (97th percentile)
overall:
249.9k births since 1912
#316 (96th percentile)
The name Ian is the #316 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 249,929 recorded births since 1912. This represents the 95.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #148 (96.8% percentile) for all time with 249,130 births since 1912. For girls, it ranks #4,917 (14.0% percentile) for all time with 799 births since 1940.
Ian first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1912 (1912 for boys and 1940 for girls).
The name Ian has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Ian reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 92.6% percentile (ranked #68) with 2,478 births per million. The name was most common in 2005, with 3,143 births per million (ranked 92.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2013, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Ian ranks #68 for boys (92.6% percentile) with 2,478 births per million, which is 78.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ian reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 3.7% percentile (ranked #784) with 19 births per million. The name was most common in 1986, with 19 births per million (ranked 3.7% percentile). Despite a peak around 2020, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for girls. Currently, Ian ranks #942 for girls (0.5% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 30.1% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ian".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ian.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ian", 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 Ian.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Ian. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 81.8% confident that Ian is pronounced as EE-uhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is AI-uhn, at 18.2% 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 Ian? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ian. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ian, 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 IY1 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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