girls:
354.5k births since 1880
#104 (98th percentile)
boys:
1.4k births since 1888
#3274 (29th percentile)
overall:
355.9k births since 1880
#204 (97th percentile)
The name Irene is the #204 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 355,879 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 97.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 97.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #104 (98.2% percentile) for all time with 354,529 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,274 (28.6% percentile) for all time with 1,350 births since 1888.
Irene has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1888 for boys).
The name Irene has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Irene reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 97.5% percentile (ranked #16) with 8,268 births per million. The name was most common in 1916, with 8,322 births per million (ranked 97.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Irene ranks #552 for girls (41.8% percentile) with 248 births per million, which is 3.0% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Irene reached its peak popularity in 1928, achieving the 7.0% percentile (ranked #505) with 38 births per million. The name was most common in 1901, with 121 births per million (ranked 4.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Irene ranks #911 for boys (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 2.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Irene".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Irene.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Irene", 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 Irene.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Irene. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 62.0% confident that Irene is pronounced as ai-REEN, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is AI-reen, at 18.0% 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 Irene? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Irene. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Irene, 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 AY0 R IY1 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker