girls:
454.6k births since 1880
#75 (99th percentile)
boys:
1.1k births since 1898
#3509 (23rd percentile)
overall:
455.7k births since 1880
#148 (98th percentile)
The name Kathryn is the #148 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 455,714 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #75 (98.7% percentile) for all time with 454,622 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,509 (23.4% percentile) for all time with 1,092 births since 1898.
Kathryn has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1898 for boys).
The name Kathryn has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Kathryn reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 94.2% percentile (ranked #48) with 3,464 births per million. The name was most common in 1951, with 4,580 births per million (ranked 93.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1986, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Kathryn ranks #556 for girls (41.3% percentile) with 244 births per million, which is 5.3% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Kathryn reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 4.9% percentile (ranked #720) with 18 births per million. The name was most common in 1898, with 53 births per million (ranked 0.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2009.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Kathryn".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Catherine. View all variations of Catherine.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Kathryn", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 42 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Catherine" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Catherine..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Kathryn. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 86.8% confident that Kathryn is pronounced as KA-thrihn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KA-thruhn, at 13.2% 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 Kathryn? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Kathryn. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Kathryn, 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 K AE1 TH R IH0 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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