girls:
195 births since 1920
#5521 (3rd percentile)
boys:
42.2k births since 1882
#544 (88th percentile)
overall:
42.4k births since 1882
#1200 (85th percentile)
The name Junior is the #1,200 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 42,420 recorded births since 1882. This represents the 84.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 84.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #544 (88.1% percentile) for all time with 42,225 births since 1882. For girls, it ranks #5,521 (3.4% percentile) for all time with 195 births since 1920.
Junior first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1882 (1882 for boys and 1920 for girls). Birth data for Junior is available in 134 out of the 142 years between 1882 and 2023 (134 years for boys and 18 years for girls). The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
The name Junior has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Junior reached its peak popularity in 1926, achieving the 79.3% percentile (ranked #115) with 1,388 births per million. The name was most common in 1926, with 1,388 births per million (ranked 79.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2017, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Junior ranks #584 for boys (35.9% percentile) with 194 births per million, which is 14.0% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Junior reached its peak popularity in 1927, achieving the 2.3% percentile (ranked #589) with 15 births per million. The name was most common in 1927, with 15 births per million (ranked 2.3% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1995.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Junior".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Junior.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Junior", 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 Junior.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Junior. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Junior is pronounced as JUE-nyer, which has 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 Junior? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Junior. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Junior, 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 UW1 N Y ER0) 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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