girls:
2.6k births since 1896
#3421 (40th percentile)
boys:
193.9k births since 1880
#187 (96th percentile)
overall:
196.4k births since 1880
#396 (95th percentile)
The name Jay is the #396 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 196,436 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 94.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #187 (95.9% percentile) for all time with 193,877 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,421 (40.1% percentile) for all time with 2,559 births since 1896.
Jay has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1896 for girls).
The name Jay has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Jay reached its peak popularity in 1960, achieving the 88.3% percentile (ranked #78) with 2,486 births per million. The name was most common in 1960, with 2,486 births per million (ranked 88.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Jay ranks #359 for boys (60.7% percentile) with 454 births per million, which is 18.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Jay reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 7.2% percentile (ranked #671) with 29 births per million. The name was most common in 1926, with 33 births per million (ranked 6.0% percentile). Despite a peak around 2015, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for girls. Currently, Jay ranks #941 for girls (0.6% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 18.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Jay".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Jay.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Jay", 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 Jay.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Jay. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Jay is pronounced as jay, 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 Jay? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Jay. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Jay, 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) 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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