girls:
23.8k births since 1880
#924 (84th percentile)
boys:
5.2M births since 1880
#1 (100th percentile)
overall:
5.3M births since 1880
#1 (100th percentile)
The name James is the #1 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 5,250,328 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 100.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 100.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1 (100.0% percentile) for all time with 5,226,569 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #924 (83.8% percentile) for all time with 23,759 births since 1880.
James has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name James has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, James reached its peak popularity in 1940, achieving the 100.0% percentile (ranked #1) with 52,674 births per million. The name was most common in 1944, with 55,398 births per million (ranked 100.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2018, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, James ranks #4 for boys (99.7% percentile) with 6,373 births per million, which is 11.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, James reached its peak popularity in 1928, achieving the 49.3% percentile (ranked #308) with 357 births per million. The name was most common in 1930, with 359 births per million (ranked 47.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, James ranks #873 for girls (7.8% percentile) with 45 births per million, which is 12.6% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "James".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of James.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "James", 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 James.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name James. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that James is pronounced as jaymz, which has 1 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 James? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with James. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for James, 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 JH EY1 M Z) 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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